E 101 




AN'S 



liisTORicAL Readers 



No. I. 



THE -DISCOVERY -AND 
EXPLORATION - OF • AMERICA 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

0-4,5. Shelf. ...o::r^ 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




MARTIN FROBTSHER. 



OILMAN'S HISTORICAL READERS. — No. I. 



THE 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 



OF 



AMERICA 



A BOOK FOR AMERICAN BOYS AND GIRLS 
ARTHUR OILMAN, M. A., 

AUTHOR OF A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, FIRST STEPS IN 

ENGLISH LITERATURE, FIRST STEPS IN GENERAL HISTORY, 

TALES OF THE PATHFINDERS, THE STORY OF 

THE SARACENS, ETC. 



^ Jul 23 1887 V) 









CHICAGO 

The Interstate Publishing Company 
Boston : 30 Franklin Street 



OTHER WORKS BY ARTHUR OILMAN. 



A History of the American People. One volume. Illustrated, 
pp. 692. Octavo. Introduction Price, $1.00. 

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Short Stories from the Dictionary. One volume, pp. 129. Sent 
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The editor of the Sunday School Times pronounces this book " lively, interesting, 
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First Steps in English Literature. One volume. i6mo. pp. 233. 
Introduction Price, $ 0.60. 

Of this Professor Carpenter says, " It is the best thing out," and Dr. Cogswell, 
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Copyright, 1887, by 
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PREFACE. 




[HE history of our country naturally divides itself 
into three portions. First, there is the period of 
Discovery and Exploration, when men of different 
nations were pushing toward the West^ on the track of 
Columbus, — trying, as he did, to find the coast of Asia, 
making desperate efforts to sail around the "island," as 
they thought it, which barred their way, and finally settling 
down to the conviction that they had come upon a conti- 
nent ; but never giving up the belief that some stream 
might be found that would afford them passage through to 
Cathay. It is with this romantic time that the present 
volume deals. 

The second period is that of Colojiization. Then the ex- 
plorers had given place to the pioneers who were cutting 
down the forests and building homes for themselves. The 
third period is that of The Making of the American Nation, 
when the English colonists, having become supreme, were 
pushed off by an obstinate king, and after a century of 
experiences, became possessed of the traits of a nation. 

The effort of the author in this volume is to tell the 
story of the adventurers in a simple style, not always 
avoiding the use of words that young readers cannot be 



iv PREFACE. 

expected to understand, but leading them from point to 
point, enlarging at once their vocabulary and their acquaint- 
ance with the subject. 

No branch of the work of education seems to the author 
of greater importance than this of giving the young their 
first impressions of the history of their own land. With 
a deep sense of this truth, the latest authorities have been 
made tributary to this volume, and the author has spared no 
pains to have it correct in every statement of facts, and 
in the difficult matter of dates. 

The work is a study of authorities, under the lead of 
such writers as those who have contributed to Mr. Winsor's 
invaluable '' Narrative and Critical History of America," and 
of those whose works are mentioned in the very extensive 
notes appended to its different chapters. For other author- 
ities the Library of Harvard College has furnished ample 
resources, and they have been extensively used. 

Among the works especially valuable for the period covered 
by this volume are the narratives of the early navigators, 
found in the publications of the Hakluyt Society and else- 
where. The young are not qualified to investigate these 
books, but they contain much that is of great interest to 
them. 

The more difficult words are explained at the close of 
the volume. The author limits the list in the hope that the 
young reader may not be discouraged by it, and he trusts 
that teachers will cultivate in them the habit of consulting 
dictionaries and other works of reference. Such a habit 
is of great importance, for no book contains all that may 
be well said on any subject. 

Cambridge, May, 1887. 



CONTENTS 



Chapter Page 

I. A Word about American History . . .7 

II. How THE Round World moves 12 

III. Something like a Wonder-Story . . . . 17 

IV. The Holy Land and Rich Cathay . . . .21 

V. How Sailors searched the Seas .... 25 

VI. Printing Books and Learning from Them . . 28 

VII. A Young Man from Italy 32 

VIII. W^HAT the Young Man thought about the World 36 

IX. Columbus asks Kings to help him . . . .39 

X. Delays and Heartaches . ... . • • 43 

XI. Two Triumphs at once 47 

XII. More Difficulties 5° 

XIII. A New World discovered 53 

XIV. Columbus at Home again 57 

XV. A Royal Welcome 61 

XVI. Columbus makes- more Voyages .... 65 

XVII. Interest in Discovery extends. . . • .72 

XVIII. The Americans the Explorers found ... 76 

XIX. The first Wars with the Savages . . . .80 

V 



VI 



CONTENTS. 



XX. The Spaniards Look for Gold .... S3 

XXI. Grand Times in Europe 87 

XXII. Bad Work in Florida 91 

XXIII. The Days of Queen Elizabeth 94 

XXIV. The Great English Pirate 98 

XXV. Trying to Sail around America . . . .103 

XXVI. Sir Walter Raleigh's Efforts end in Smoke . 107 

XXVII. The English Kings and Queens . . . .110 

XXVIII. Raleigh's last Efforts 

XXIX. English Adventurers more Restless than ever 

XXX. King James's Council for Virginia 

XXXI. Virginia settled 123 

Explanation of the Pronunciation and Meaning 
of a few Words 127 



113 
116 
120 



THE 



DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 



OF AMERICA 




CHAPTER I. 

A WORD ABOUT AMERICAN HISTORY. 

HERE is a great difference between the 
history of America and that of many other 
countries. If you try to learn the history 
of England, for instance, you find that you are car- 
ried back into ages far gone, when all is dark and 
blank. No one knows much, if anything, about the 
first people who lived in that country. Wq can 
find out about the men who were in England when 
our fathers lived there ; and we can go back to a 
time before America was heard of, or even thought 
of; but at last we come to the names of such 



8 BURIED HISTORY. 

persons as king Arthur, and of Pendragon who Is 
said to have been his father, and we cannot be sure 
that they ever Hved. 

Back of those days we find stories, however, that 
we can beHeve. There was a man who came to 
Britain from Rome, and said that he conquered the 
land. His name was Juhus Caesar, and w^e have 
his accounts of w4iat he found and of what he did. 
We can be very sure of the fact that he went to 
Britain from GauL Gaul is the name by which 
France was called ages ago. Farther back than 
that we cannot go in English history. 

We may, it is true, dig up pieces of stone, and 
perhaps scraps of copper and iron, which tell us 
that there w^ere men in Britain before the time of 
Caesar, and from these articles we can learn some- 
thing about them and their habits. 

We can see that the pieces of stone were shaped 
by them in some way to be used as hatchets and 
arrow-heads, or perhaps as harpoons. We can be 
sure that these people lived near the seashore. They 
were afraid of the w^ild beasts of the forests, and 
could more safely catch fish for their food than hunt 
animals. We can find great stones made into regu- 



STORIKS GO FROM MOUTH TO MOUTH. 9 

lar shapes and piled up in a way that nature never 
could have put them ; but we cannot even guess how 
the men of that early time contrived to move such 
immense weights, or to trim such stones. 

After all, when w^e have dug into the earth as 
much as w^e can, to find out what the first men of 
England did and how they lived, it is little we can 
learn about them. They did not write, and it is 
not easy to carry stories from one man to another 
without writing them down, even if the men live at 
the same time. When they live hundreds of years 
apart it is only possible for one set to know what 
the former did if the father tells his son, and sends 
the story along in that way. It is not a good way 
to carry a story. Stories are changed by passing 
from mouth to mouth, and often come to. the last 
hearer in a very different shape from their original 
one. 

Suppose, for instance, there had been a great 
man ages ago, and the men of his time had told 
about him to their sons, and they again to theirs. 
I think that his brave acts would have seemed 
greater to the son than they did to the father, 
and greater still to the grandson, and so on, until 



10 HISTORY WRITTEN IN BOOKS. 

after a while men might think that he could not 
have been a man at all, but a giant, or a child of 
the gods. The next step would be to think that 
he was himself a god ; and thus in time the great 
man would be worshiped by his own descendants. 
No doubt such things have happened. 

There is no danger of this sort in the case of 
the history of America. Not only did men know 
how to write at the time that our history begins, 
but they knew how to print, as you shall see. 
When books are written, they are laid away care- 
fully on shelves in libraries built for the purpose, 
and there they remain safe until many sons and 
grandsons of the writers have read them, and thus 
the stories in them are surely known many, many 
years after they were first written. This is true of 
books that are only written ; but when a book is 
printed, many copies are saved. As they are in 
different libraries, it is pretty safe to say that they 
will not all be destroyed by fire or decay for ages. 

So you see, we may be quite sure of the princi- 
pal facts in the history of our country, even from the 
very beginning of it. There are difficulties, how- 
ever. The men who wrote the first books about 



DIFFICULTIES IN STUDYING HISTORY. II 

America did not always know as much as they ought, 
and thus they may have made errors. If they wrote 
about what their friends and neighbors did, they may 
easily have been mistaken ; and if they wrote about 
what they did themselves, they may have forgotten 
some things, or they may have omitted acts that they 
did not want to have remembered. 




CHAPTER II. 




HOW THE ROUND WORLD MOVES. 

HERE are many other reasons why it Is 
not ahvays easy to get at the real truth of 
history. Men in early times did not know 
some facts that are very plain and familiar to us now. 
They thought that they knew, however, and wrote 
as If they knew. 

It was supposed in the olden time that the world 
did not move ; but even the youngest child knows 
now that it is the sun which stands still, while the 
earth rolls around on its axis from west to east 
every day. It is for this reason that the sun's light 
comes to our eyes in the morning over the eastern 
hills, and fades away In the west at nightfall. 

Not only did our forefathers think that the earth 
stood still, but they supposed it to be an immovable, 



A DARING SHIPiMAX'S SAIL. 1 3 

flat, round Island of great size floating in an immense 
sea called Ocean. They were acquainted with Greece 
and Italy, and with portions of Asia and Africa, but 
they thought that the Mediterranean Sea, which they 
called the Great Sea, or, affectionately. Our Sea, 
stretched almost from one end of the world to the 
other. Around this sea the great nations of the 
world were settled '' like ants or froes around a 
marsh," as Socrates said. 

In the course of time astronomers began to 
understand that the earth could not possibly be flat, 
for they saw that its shadow was round. Then they 
thought that it might be shaped like a cylinder or 
roller. After a while some ventured to suggest that 
it was a globe, as it is ; but no one was quite 
certain of this until the year 1520, when a daring 
shipman had sailed around It, going to the west- 
ward from Europe and returning by the way of 
Asia. This man was named Magellan. 

About a hundred years before this, however, a 
book was written In which It was said that ships 
might sail completely around the earth, as we know 
that they can ; but so strange did the notion appear 
that few believed It. The writer of that book, and 



14 NATIONS MOVE AROUND THE GLOBE. 

it was a very strange one, was said to be a certain 
knio-ht, "Sir John Mandeville," but now-a-days 
scholars suspect that there never was such a knight, 
and that some skilful writer concealed himself under 
that name. There is no doubt that this book was 
made out of the stories of real travelers. One of 
them was Marco Polo, who had gone to the East, 
and had given the people of Venice marvelous ac- 
counts of what he had seen. He was the most 
remarkable of all travelers. This shows how diffi- 
cult it is to find out the truth when much time has 
passed. 

An old geographer named Ptolemy, who lived 
in Egypt fifteen hundred years before " Sir John 
Mandeville," had held the same opinion that is ex- 
pressed in his book, but he thought that all the 
other parts of the universe revolved around our little 
world ! 

Not only does the world itself move, but it is 
a very interesting fact that the nations on it have 
steadily moved also. No one knows on what spot the 
first man lived, but there are good reasons for be- 
lievine that it was somewhere in the center of the 
continent of Asia. There, among the highest moun- 



EVERYBODY LOOKS WESTWARD. 1 5 

tains of the world, at any rate, lived the men who 
were forefathers of the Greeks and Romans, of the 
French and Germans, and of the English and 
American people. History tells us that the children 
of those people of Asia have been slowly traveling 
westward for ages. They first crossed over into the 
center of Europe in large bodies ; and then they 
passed to the islands of Britain, where they lived for 
hundreds of years before they got any farther. 

During all these long periods of time these people 
seemed to be looking westward, and asking them- 
selves what miorht be found there. Some of them 
dreamed of a land of gold, or of a country where the 
people never grew old, in the direction of sunset. 
So they went to the edge of the great Atlantic ocean 
and peered out into the fogs which hid the distance 
from them. 

They began to talk about wondrous islands in 
the mysterious sea. Some even ventured to describe 
them and their inhabitants. In those early days men 
were very ready to believe wonderful stories. Some 
of their vessels, puny and small as they were, had 
been driven by the winds out into the ocean, and 
thus, much against their will, they had discovered 



l6 WONDERS IN THE OCEAN ISLANDS. 

some of the islands that He in that region. In this 
way they had accidentally found the Canaries, the 
Madeira Islands, and others, and thus their imagina- 
tion had been excited. There were giants there, 
they said ; there were sirens ; there was the bright 
home of a fair maiden and her lover, who had fled 
from England in the gay days of romance, when 
Edward the Third reigned, and there were their 
graves ! In some regions, they said, ships with iron 
in them could not sail, because there were load- 
stones that drew the nails out! 





CHAPTER III. 

SOMETHING LIKE A WONDER-STORY. 

F )'ou look at a map of the world you will 
see to the north of Eng-land a great many 
islands that stretch out towards Iceland and 
Greenland from Norway. These are the Orkney, the 
Shetland, and the Faroe Islands. They reach almost 
all the way to Labrador, and it would not have been 
strange if some seamen should have sailed from one 
to another, and thus have actually reached America 
long ago. If we look at the other side of America, 
we find that it reaches still nearer to Asia, and 
we can see no reason why men might not have 
sailed across from that direction too ; perhaps they 
did both. 

The men of Norway were strong, and loved to 
battle with the sea and with their neighbors. They 



17 



I8 THE VIKINGS SAIL WESTWARD. 

lived in a country where the sah water extends far 
up into the land in a great many places. High rocks 
form the steep sides of the inlets. They are called 
fiords. Though a fiord is simply a bay or inlet, we 
always think of such a rock-bound bay, when we 
see the name, because the word is used for that 
particular kind of a bay in Norway. 

Men who love battle make quarrels for the sake 
of fighting, and the men of this country who are 
called vikings, or sea-robbers, found much of their 
employment in going out from their fiords in strong 
vessels to fight their neighbors, and to make them- 
selves rich with what they could take from them. 
They went to Iceland and far into the Mediterranean 
Sea and to Russia. When they got home again 
they boasted of what they had done, and their singers 
sung songs about their exciting adventures. These 
singers were the poets of the northland. We know 
that poets do not always feel bound to make their 
poems true history. They wish to stir the men who 
hear or read their words, and thev make the acts 
they sing of as grand and noble as they can. The 
skalds of the north-lands, as the poets there were 
called, wished to make sagas, or sayings, that would 



THE SKALDS SING OF WONDROUS DEEDS. I9 

Stir their hearers. Stories of adventure would do 
this, and of battle with enemies. 

Therefore the skalds made it out that their heroes 
had done wonderful deeds ; had ventured into dis- 
tant regions, and had seen things that surprised 
them. They did not write these songs down ; they 
sang them, and thus they went from mouth to mouth, 
from father to son. We cannot tell how much of 
them to believe. Perhaps it is not important ; be- 
cause whatever the vikings did, it does not concern 
Americans much. 

The stories tell us that about eight or nine 
hundred years ago the vikings, who were, )'ou must 
know, the best sailors of the time, actually sailed 
from island to island until they reached our shores. 
There they visited a pleasant region that they called 
Vinland, because they found grapes in the woods. 
They liked the country, and tried to establish a colony. 
This was at about the year looo. The first Norse- 
man who got across would not have done it if he 
had not been lost in a fog. He sailed in an oppo- 
site direction to that which he intended. The name 
given to the discoverer of Vinland is Leif. He failed 
to found a colony, and no other Norseman was more 
successful. 



20 A TOWER AND A SKELETON. 

Where Vinland may have been no one can tell. 
It has been thought that it was on the coast of New 
England. There is an old round tower in Newport, 
Rhode Island, that was once supposed to be a relic 
of the Norsemen, but hardly anybody thinks so now. 
There is a stone on the brink of Taunton River, in 
the town of Berkeley, which bears some marks that 
were once thought by some to have been cut ages 
before the English saw it ; but nothing can be made 
of them, and the best we can do is to suppose that 
the Indians chiseled the marks. 

About fifty years ago a skeleton in armor was 
dug up near Fall River, and Mr. Longfellow wrote 
a poetical story upon it, in which he brings to mind 
in a lively way the days of the Norsemen, and the 
tales of their skalds. In it w^e can almost see the 
bold men launching their graceful barques on the 
wild Atlantic, and sailing like fierce cormorants 
through storm and hurricane towards mysterious 
Vinland ! This is as much poetry as any saga of 
the ancient skalds. In fact, the whole account of 
the visits of the vikings to America must be set 
down as very like a wonder-story. 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE HOLY LAND AND RICH CATHAY. 




EOPLE are generally so much interested in 
what others are about, that when one man 
begins to do anything new, many others 
follow his example. A hundred years after the time 
that the vikings are supposed to have sailed to Vin- 
land, there was a great stir in sleepy Europe which 
excited men more than they had. been excited for 
ages. A good pilgrim who had traveled to Jerusa- 
lem went about the countries telling the people that 
the Saracens, who then owned the Holy Land, did 
not honor the Holy Places connected with the life 
and death of Jesus. 

He roused the people everywhere so much that 
they thought that God called them to go to the 
Holy Land and to take it away from the Saracens. 



22 GOING TO FIGHT THE SARACENS. 

The result was that for two hundred years Christians 
everywhere were filled with enthusiasm on the sub- 
ject, and thousands and thousands of warriors roamed 
over Europe, through Asia Minor, and across the 
Mediterranean, until they came to Palestine, where 
they fought the Saracens. Sometimes they gained 
victories, but just as often they were terribly defeated. 

Men had not been accustomed to travel much 
before these times ; but then they found that there 
was enjoyment as well as thrilling adventure to be 
gained by going from land to land. They learned 
many things, too, for those who stay always at home 
know but little about the ways of the world. The 
hosts of crusaders who went to Palestine heard of 
other wonderful lands, and found that there were 
things in them that they would like to have. Thus 
foreign commerce sprung up. Many pilgrims passed 
through Italy, and the cities there became rich after 
a while. Then other cities also entertained pilgrims 
and became rich. When in the process of time men 
discovered that they could guide their ships by 
means of the compass, they became bolder and 
com.merce grew more extensive. 

Throuo-h the stories of Marco Polo, and other 



MARCO POLO TELLS OF WONDERS. 23 

travelers, men in Europe heard of a country called 
India, of an island called Cipango, and of Cathay, the 
empire of a great ruler called the Grand Cham. 
Cipango was what we now call Japan, and the em- 
pire of Cathay was China. In those lands there 
were gold and diamonds and pearls ; there were great 
elephants, and lions and leopards and griffins, and 
beasts of the most marvelous kind. There were ants 
that collected gold for men, and filled vessels with it. 
There were trees that bore lambs without wool, bread 
that did not need to be cooked, and meal and honey. 
There was such wealth there that the pavements of 
the palaces were of silver and gold, and above all, — 
and perhaps this was the chief attraction of the 
Eastern lands, — there was a fountain of youth of 
which if a man drank he never would erow old. 

It was not easy to reach Palestine. It was more 
difficult to get to India; and to reach Cipango and 
Cathay required long, dreary marches through the 
wastes of Europe, over the high mountains between 
the continents, across burninor deserts on the back 
of a camel, and ever so much sailing on the Mediter- 
ranean Sea, or on the seas that stretched around the 
eastern countries. It did not matter to those men 



24 EUROPE KEPT WIDE AWAKE. 

that there was more wealth to be made by cultivating 
the soil at home than there was by going on these 
toilsome voyages into the midst of unknown perils. 
They kept on doing the harder thing, only hoping 
all the time that some easier way might be found to 
go to . India and Cipango. The hope of gain kept 
them all wide awake. 




CHAPTER V. 




HOW SAILORS SEARCHED THE SEAS. 

E AN WHILE the sailors of the Mediter- 
ranean were searching every nook of the 
sea, and even venturing into the Atlantic 
to see if they could discover what there was of Africa 
beyond the waters in which the Canary Islands lay. 
Slowly and surely the mariners of Spain, under direc- 
tion of Prince Henry of Portugal, — called the Navi- 
gator, because he thus encouraged discovery, — sailed 
down towards the equator and beyond it, until, in 
1487, one Bartholomew Diaz was driven by furious 
winds quite around the southern end of Africa. On 
his wa)^ home he discovered the promontory that 
we call the Cape of Good Hope, though he called 
it the Cape of Tempests, because he had so much 
trouble in o^ettinor around it. He did not see it 



25 



26 WHAT THE WAVES WASHED UP. 

when he passed it the first tniie. This was a step 
towards the route for ships to India for which Prince 
Henry was searching, though it was not understood 
at the time. 

Sometimes the ocean washed up on the shores 
of the islands west of Europe bits of wood that 
showed that they had been carved by men's hands, 
and with them came cane-stalks, and at last two bodies 
of drowned men drifted ashore. Once a pilot sail- 
ing far out into the Atlantic, hundreds of miles west 
of the coast of Portugal, picked up such a curious 
piece of carved wood, which seemed to have come 
from the West. Again, the waves cast up trunks 
of great trees of a kind not known on the islands. 
Once a mariner from St. Mary, one of the Azores, 
said that in sailing northerly he saw land to the west, 
which his company took to be Tartary. Thus the 
testimony of years gave one man, at least, reason to 
think that the coast of India, or Cathay, or Cipango, 
was not very far distant, and that these articles had 
drifted from there. 

Though most men still believed that Ocean was 
the bound of all the earth, and that its terrible winds, 
huge fishes, frightful tempests, and great depth would 



WHAT THE WAVES WASHED UP. 27 

forever keep sailors from visiting the mysterious isl- 
ands that they were sure lay hidden in its mists, it 
was not so with all. There were a few who were 
sure that the earth was a globe, and not a very 
large one either. They agreed with " Sir John 
Mandeville," in whom they fully believed, that if the 
earth were a globe there must be some way around 
it, and that by going far enough towards the west a 
sailor would in time reach the Indies. What brilliant 
visions rose in the mind of the man who thought of 
a short way of getting to India, to the rich gold-hills 
of Cathay, and the diamond-fields thereabout! 





CHAPTER VI. 

PRINTING BOOKS AND LEARNING FROM THEM. 

HERE was another reason why men at the 
time of which I am speaking should have 
been wide awake. They had just begun 
to print books, and thus knowledge was beginning 
to become more common. Italy was the foremost 
country of Europe. To it there had come a great 
many Christian scholars who had before that tim.e 
lived at Constantinople. They left their homes be- 
cause the city fell into the hands of the Saracens, 
whom they considered their enemies. They wrote 
books, and studied the old Greek language and the 
great books that learned Greeks had written ages 
before. Such men as these naturally helped Italy 
in its progress, and as learning increased, prosperity 
followed in other affairs. 

28 



1453.] THE BIRTH OF COLUMBUS. 29 

Now It happened that at about the same time 
that men began to print books, and at the same time 
that these learned men came to Italy/ there was born 
In the vicinity of Genoa, on the beautiful blue Medi- 
terranean, a little boy whose name Is now known 
everywhere because he grew up to become the most 
successful of all the navigators of his time, and the 
most celebrated of all time. In his own language 
this boy's name was Chrlstofero Columbo, but In 
our day It Is written Christopher Columbus. 

This boy lived In a place where the sea was always 
before him, and where he saw little to attract him on 
land. He became Infatuated with the free life of 
the sailor, and his father naturally remembered this 
as he selected the studies for him In his young days. 
His favorite books were two, — the geography of 
Ptolemy, written about sixteen hundred years before, 
and the travels ascribed to Mandevllle, written about 
a hundred years before. So slowly did men live In 
the days of Columbus, that neither of these books 

1 This was in the year 1453, but we do not know in what year 
printing was invented, nor exactly when Cohimbus was born, though 
the great discoverer probably first saw the light a few years before 
the fall of Constantinople. 



30 



THE STUDIES OF COLUMBUS. 



could be called "behind the times" then. In his 
first school he was taught something of reading, 
writing, drawing, and arithmetic, and when he went 
to the university he learned what he could of geome- 
try, astronomy, navigation, and geography ; though 
litde was known on the last-mentioned subject even 
in enlightened Italy. 

Map-makers drew vague oudines of the countries, 
putting down islands in the seas where they thought 
islands might be, and drawing pictures of land and 
sea monsters in the regions that they confessed they 
knew little or nothing about. However, in these 
days people were learning how little they really knew 
of the earth on which they lived, and w^ere diligently 
seeking information in every direction. Their im- 
aginations w^ere on the alert and they were gratified 
by every nev.^ bit of information that came to them. 
It was no play-day enterprise to go on a voyage 
in the Mediterranean in those days. Nations, cities, 
and private noblemen, all had their vessels on the 
waters preying on whatever they met, and not hesi- 
tating to shed blood if they could not obtain the 
mastery over their opponents without. When vessels 
came together they grappled and fought until night 



THE STORIES OF NAVIGATORS. 3 1 

put an end to the struggle, unless one or the other 
gave way, or unless the hand-grenades or other fiery 
missiles set the vessels on fire and sent them to the 
bottom. 

For a score of years the sturdy young sailor busied 
himself in voyaging over the Mediterranean ; but 
then he seems to have heard of the enterprises of 
Prince Henry of Portugal. Certainly he followed the 
crowd of strangers who were drawn to Lisbon by 
the exciting stories of discoveries made by navigators. 
Portugal, which had before been almost an unknown 
country, now rose to a position of great importance. 
Lisbon, its capital, was constantly stirred by the 
stories of adventurers coming home, or by the ex- 
pectations roused by others just setting out for 
unknown reo^ions. 




CHAPTER VII. 



A YOUNG MAN FROM ITALY. 




ERE the young man from Italy became 
acquainted with a daughter of an ItaHan 
navicrator. She attended service with him 
at the chapel of the convent of All Saints. After a 
while the two strangers were married. The bride's 
father was not living, and the young husband was 
taken to her home, where he found the papers left 
by the old navigator, and heard tales of his many 
voyages and adventures. Columbus soon began to 
make voyages himself. 

He went to the Gold Coast, and made maps of 
the recrions he visited. Gradually he obtained some 
reputation for making good maps, and was brought 
into correspondence with men of science and in- 
fluence. For a while he lived on Porto Santo, one 



32 



1474.] COLUMBUS STUDIES GEOGRAPHY. 33 

of the Madeira Islands, and there his son Diego 
was born. 

The world of navigators was alive with the longing 
to discover the passage to India that Prince Henry 
had thought might be found by sailing down the 
coast of Africa, as indeed it might. The ships came 
and w^ent from the harbor of Porto Santo, carrying 
brave sailors full of stories of all sorts of adventure, 
and of wild imagination about the mysterious islands 
that were supposed to lie to the westward. 

Any active )'Oung man w'ould have listened to 
such stirring accounts as these mariners brought, 
and Columbus did not neglect them. He talked 
them over with wiser men, and compared them with 
each other. He read what had been written in time 
past about the world, its size and form, and about 
men and companies of men who had been known to 
go out into the Atlantic and be lost. 

While Columbus lived at Porto Santo, and, indeed, 
the very year that Diego was born, which was 1474, 
he had some important correspondence with a learned 
Italian about the discovery of w^estern lands. This 
man, Paolo Toscanelli, believed that India and Cathay 
might be reached by sailing westward, and in one 



34 A REMARKABLE MAP. 

letter he gave an interesting account of the magnifi- 
cence of Cathay, taken from Marco Polo. Probably 
this had a great influence upon Columbus ; at any 
rate, it seems to have caused him to study Marco 
Polo's work. 

Toscanelli sent Columbus a remarkable map. On 
it the coast of Asia was drawn in front of the western 
coasts of Europe and Africa, about where America 
really lies. There were many islands very conven- 
iently arranged between the continents. Cipango 
was the largest. It was some distance east of Cathay, 
and nearer Europe still were the Island of St. 
Brandan, and then the Cape Verde, Canary, and 
Madeira Islands. It seemed as if a man might strike 
them one after another by sailing westward. 

When we look at the great ships that sail over 
the ocean to-day, we are in danger of forgetting that 
in the time of which we are speaking there were none 
of that size and kind. The ships in which Columbus 
sailed down the coast of Africa and to the islands, 
were smaller than most that we see in our rivers and 
lakes. Many of them were called caravels, which 
your dictionary tells you means light, round, old- 
fashioned ships with square poops. They had high 



HOW THE CARAVELS LOOKED. 35 

bows and sterns, with castles on the sterns ; their 
masts were short and their sails were square ; they 
had no decks, and they were so frail that one would 
not dare, no\v-a-days, to venture far from land in 
them. Columbus, however, did not think large 
vessels were adapted to the purposes of voyages of 
discovery, as they required too much depth of water, 
and might not be able to explore bays and rivers. 




CHAPTER VIII. 




WHAT THE YOUNG MAN THOUGHT ABOUT THE 
WORLD. 

OLUMBUS agreed with Sir John Mandevllle 
that the earth was round ; but he thought 
that It was so small that the sea could not 
be very wide that stretched from Spain to India. 
He knew nothing of the continent that lay between. 
He put together all the Information that he was able 
to gather, and then argued from the nature of things 
that he was right. He did not see any objection to 
his theory. Every piece of wood that floated from 
the w^estward made him more confident. Every reed 
washed ashore by the west wind was strong enough 
to strengthen his faith. 

He not only thought the globe smaller than it 
Is, but he was sure that Asia was much greater than 
it is, and extended farther around towards the Atlan- 
36 



WISHING TO ATTACK THE SARACENS. 37 

tic. His mistakes are of little consequence now, 
but if he had known the truth, perhaps even his 
strong will would have been too weak to lead him to 
enter upon his perilous voyage. 

The Crusades had failed to drive the Saracens 
permanendy from the Holy Land, and Columbus 
thought that perhaps he might accomplish the great 
work, if only he could attack the Moslems from the 
other side. One of his chief desires, as he expressed 
them, was to extend the Christian religion. Every- 
where he went he made constant inquiries about 
the land of the Grand Cham, hoping that at some 
happy time he might actually come upon wealthy 
Cathay. He was poor, and year after year passed 
away without bringing to him any definite hope that 
he should ever be able to set forth on his great 
voyage. This did not keep him from making short 
expeditions, and in one of these he is supposed to 
have visited Iceland. 

There were many reasons why men had not 
ventured much out of sight of land in their ships 
in early ages, and in fact at any time before those 
of which I am now writing. They had no means of 
telling where they were when they could not see the 



38 A NEW NAUTICAL INSTRUMENT. [1484. 

shore. At the beginning of the century in which 
Columbus Hved the mariner's compass had been 
brought into more general use, and other helps to 
the sailor had been invented. 

Just at the time that Columbus needed it, while 
he was delaying his voyage, indeed, an invention 
was made that proved of great service to all navi- 
gators. There was an ancient instrument called the 
astrolabe, which had been used for ages by astrono- 
mers and astrologers as a means of finding the 
position of the stars. It was at this time first applied 
successfully to the uses of the seaman. By means 
of this he was able to tell his latitude on a chart, 
though not very accurately, no matter how far he 
might be from any shore. This imperfect instrument 
was in time given up for the quadrant or sextant, 
which was invented about one hundred and fifty years 
ago by a friend of Sir Isaac Newton in England, 
and by Thomas Godfrey in Philadelphia at the same 
time. 



•^Af^j? 



CHAPTER IX. 




COLUMBUS ASKS KINGS TO HELP HIM. 

r was not long after this application of the 
astrolabe to the uses of the sailor, that 
Columbus began earnest efforts to obtain 
help in carrying out his great enterprise. He had 
argued and studied upon the question long enough ; 
now he determined to act as soon as possible. No 
way seemed open to him unless he could influence 
some sovereign to give him money and ships, and no 
sovereiorn would do this unless he could be made 
pretty certain that the enterprise would bring back 
more money than it cost. Here was a difficult prob- 
lem for the enterprising Italian to solve. 

Portuofal had been in advance of the world in 
making voyages of discovery, and therefore it seemed 
most promising to apply to the king of that country. 

39 



40 THE CARDINAL SHAKES HIS HEAD. [1485. 

Columbus made the application, but alas he failed ! 
He sent his brother to ask king Henry the Seventh 
of England to take advantage of the opportunity to 
add glory to his reign ; but he was not successful. 

Columbus then turned to Spain, at that time 
ruled by Ferdinand and Isabella. They were then 
engaged in fighting the Saracens, who had been in 
the land more than seven hundred years. In 1485 
Columbus obtained an opportunity to present his 
case to the Grand Cardinal of Spain at Cordova, and 
we may be sure that he argued it with earnestness. 

At first the great dignitary was inclined to think 
that the views of the navigator were opposed to the 
Bible ; but at last he decided that they should not 
be condemned until they had at least been heard 
by king Ferdinand. The king was impressed as the 
Cardinal had been by the earnest eloquence of the 
petitioner ; but even he was not willing to decide in 
his favor until he had obtained the opinion of a body 
of wise churchmen. 

These wise men were not wise enough to see how 
there could be men on the other side of the globe, 
standing with their feet toward those on the other 
side. They asked Columbus what the Bible meant 



CAN SNOW FALL UPWARD? 4I 

when it said that the heavens were spread out as a 
curtain and as a tent. " How," they asked, " can the 
rain, snow, and hail fall upward, and the trees grow 
with their branches downward ? " 

These men thought that the globe, if it were a 
globe, must be so great that it would take two or 
three years for a ship to sail around it. They were 
sure that if a vessel were to succeed in getting to 
the opposite side, it would certainly be unable to sail 
back again, for it would have to go up-hill ! 

In vain did Columbus try to explain that the Bible 
was not given to men as a book of science, but that 
it contained language adapted for the understanding 
of those for whom it was written ; and that ships 
had, in fact, gone a part of the way around the globe 
without having any difficulty in sailing back again. 
The counselors of king Ferdinand would not be con- 
vinced, and they sent Columbus away with his petition 



uneranted. 



W'as the poor mariner cast down by all this delay 
and opposition ? One might expect him to lose every 
spark of hope; but it was not so. He patiently fol- 
lowed the king and his court, as they went from camp 
to camp in the course of the great war against the 



42 A CONFERENCE WITH THE KING. 

Saracens. Probably he was much interested in the 
struggle, for he was as desirous as any one to see 
the arms of Christian Spain win victory over the 
enemy. The conference with the churchmen had 
been held at Salamanca. 

Two years later Columbus was called to confer 
with the king, w^ho was then pressing the siege of 
Malaga, but the work of w^ar was so exciting that 
there was no opportunity for the king to hear the 
sailor. Then there followed another year of suspense. 
In the course of it the king of Portugal and the king 
of England sent Columbus word that they would like 
to see him, and they gave some encouraging promises. 
Both of these tempting offers were declined, and it 
must have been because Columbus felt quite sure 
that P^erdinand would give the desired help. 



CHAPTER X. 



DELAYS AND HEARTACHES. 




N 1489 arrangements were made for another 
conference between Ferdinand and Colum- 
bus at Seville. Lodgings were provided for 
the sailor, and everything else duly arranged ; but, 
alas! another campaign opened, and no conference 
could be held. In this campaign, — one of the most 
glorious of all in the long war, — Columbus is said to 
have taken active part. Queen Isabella attended with 
an unusually stately train. Not long afterward one 
of the rival kings of the Saracens surrendered. 

Then there came news of greater sufferings by 
Christians in Palestine, and a strong desire to go on 
a crusade was kindled among the fiery Spaniards. 
The year 1490 came, and with it the proud entry 
into Seville by Ferdinand and Isabella, and the fes- 

43 



44 COLUMBUS STARTS FOR FRANCE. [1490 

tivities connected with the marriage of their daughtei 
to the son of the king of Portugal. Winter and 
spring passed. They were crowded with feasts and 
tournaments and processions ; and what thought could 
a king and a queen give then to the petition of a 
sailor offering to show them a way around the world! 

After these shows had passed another campaign 
opened, and again Columbus was thrust away. Still, 
he determined to make one great effort before the 
army was actually in the field, and to get, if possi- 
ble, an answer ; for he thought that even a refusal 
would be better than any longer suspense. 

Some consideration was shown him, but finally a 
repulse came. The sovereigns said no, but at the 
same time gave Columbus some hope that, if ever 
the war should close, the matter would be considered 
again. It would seem like a forlorn hope. 

Almost heartbroken, Columbus now turned his 
thoughts toward France, and actually set out to go 
there. On his way to take ship he stopped 
with his child at the gate of a convent to ask food, 
and the prior took interest in him, heard his story, 
detained him as his guest, and at last sent a mes- 
senger to the queen with a letter urging her to 
consider again the cause of poor Columbus. 



1492.J THE SURRENDER OF BOABDIL. 45 

Isabella returned a favorable answer, and soon 
the prior himself went to see her. He made an 
earnest plea for his guest, showed the queen how 
honest his offer was, how much to the glory of 
Spain success would be, if won, and led her to call 
Columbus to her side again. 

We need no words from history to assure us 
that Columbus was happy as he received from the 
prior the money that the queen sent him for expenses 
of the journey to her court. It was then at a new 
town called Santa Fe, near Granada. The siege 
which was destined to close the war w^as in progress. 
Columbus rode on a mule provided by Isabella, and 
was clad in new clothes bought with her money. 

When he reached Santa Fe it was just in time to 
see Boabdil, the last of the Saracenic kings, come 
out of the palace of the Alhambra to deliver the 
keys of Granada to the Spanish sovereigns, and to 
witness a brilliant triumph, after a war of eight years. 
During the whole of this time Columbus had been 
looking in vain for the help that his heart now 
assured him was soon to come. 

It was eighteen years since the design had first 
been formed. The queen listened with interest ; but 



46 HOPE AT LAST! [1492. 

at last, in consequence of the advice of her priests, 
repHed that the enterprise, magnificent as it was, 
would be purchased at too great a cost ! Then 
Columbus mounted his mule firmly determined to 
turn to France, in accordance with his former in- 
tention. 

He slowly rode away over the plain that spreads 
out around Santa Fe and Granada. Just as his mule 
was about to disappear from sight he was overtaken 
by a swift messenger, who told him that the queen 
had offered to pledge her jewels, if necessary, to raise 
the money needed to fit out the expedition. Gladly 
he turned the beast toward the rocky heights and 
soon reached Santa Fe, where he had^ another 
audience with the queen. 




CHAPTER XI. 



TWO TRIUMPHS AT ONCE. 




T was a brilliant scene that Columbus wit- 
nessed when the last of the Moorish kings 
gave up the keys of Granada. A great 
crowd of people gathered to see the ceremonies, 
which on one side w^ere so joyous and on the other 
so sad. Every three minutes the dull boom of the 
euns of the fortress thundered forth, and in the 
midst of the noise Boabdil came out and handed 
the keys to Ferdinand in token of defeat and 
submission. 

He said : '' These keys are the last relics of the 
government of the Saracens in Spain ! To thee, 
O king! are our kingdom, our castles, our person. 
Such is the decree of Allah ! Take them, but treat 
us with the kindness thou hast promised ! " To 

47 



48 THE LAST SIGH OF THE MOOR. [1492. 

the new governor of Granada Boabclil handed his 
costly ring, saying: ''With this signet have I gov- 
erned Granada. Take it, and rule with it, and 
Allah make you more fortunate than I have been ! " 

As Boabdil rode away from the city he too, like 
Columbus, turned before he got out of sight of its 
towers and palaces. As he saw for the last time the 
crucifix sparkling in the sun above the lovely Alham- 
bra he burst into tears, and cried, "Allah is great!" 
The spot has been called the " Last sigh of the 
Moor," and is remembered as carefully as the one 
on which Columbus stopped his mule, when he looked 
back and turned again toward the court at the call of 
the queen. Boabdil went away in despair ; Columbus 
entered with glorious expectation. 

The hopes of Columbus were well founded. 
Good queen Isabella saw him immediately, and atoned 
for all past delays by the honest interest that she 
took in influencing Ferdinand to enter into the 
agreement with the mariner. On the seventeenth 
of April the important paper was duly signed by the 
sovereigns and the sailor at Santa Fe, which made 
Columbus and his heirs and successors admirals in 
all the lands that he might discover in the ocean. 



HONORS PROMISED COLUMBUS. 49 

One tenth of all the precious stones, gold, silver, 
spices, and other merchandise, however obtained in 
the new lands, were to be the admiral's. He was to 
be sole judge in all disputes that might arise out of 
the commerce that was expected to be created. 

Columbus had been very positive that he ought 
to have all these honors and privileges secured to 
him before he should start. If he had not been 
determined about this he might have made an 
agreement with Ferdinand before he did. The 
queen sympathized^ with Columbus in desiring to 
spread the Christian religion, but doubtless the more 
worldly-wise king was greatly influenced by the vis- 
ions of gold, silver, and diamonds that he saw before 
him. The treasurer paid the bills, and Isabella did 
not have to give up her jewels, as she said she was 
willing to. 

Columbus expressed the devout wish that the 
wealth that was to come to Spain should be conse- 
crated to a Crusade to take the sepulcher of Christ 
away from the Saracens. He believed that he was 
to be the agent of God in effecting this great work. 



CHAPTER XII. 



MORE DIFFICULTIES. 




HE difficulties of our hero were not over 
when the aereement was signed. On the 
third of May, with a joyful heart, Columbus 
bade the court farewell and started for Palos, where 
he intended to get his ships ready. There he was 
met by his faithful friend of the convent, — the same 
who had before interested Isabella in his behalf. 

On the twenty-third of the month they went to 
a church where many of the inhabitants and officials 
had been called to attend. There the orders of the 
sovereigns were read with much solemn pomp, and 
the authorities promised obedience ; but when they 
learned the real nature of the expedition they were 
filled with dismay. Brave sailors refused to venture 
on such an enterprise. Every frightful tale of the 

50 



1492.] MEN FORCED TO GO. 5 1 

dangers of Ocean that could be remembered was 
conjured up, and weeks passed before any progress 
could be made in getting ships and men. 

The king and queen heard that their subjects 
refused to obey their commands, and sent officers 
to Palos to force men to supply the ships, and to 
oblige sailors to go on them. Even then every 
difficulty was put in the way of Columbus. The men 
who were to get the ships ready for sea did the work 
so poorly at first that no one would dare to set out 
in them. \Mien they were brought back to do it 
over, they refused, and ran away. In the same spirit 
the sailors, after being forced to enlist, would desert 
and hide themselves. 

May passed away ; June came and w-ent ; and yet 
the little vessels were not fitted out. July passed and 
August began before the ships were ready; but then 
every difficulty had been overcome, and as the sun 
rose on Friday, the third of August, three frail barques 
slowly steered toward the southwest, bearing ninety 
sailors, a physician, a surgeon, several priests, some 
gentlemen and servants, — in all one hundred and 
twenty persons, with provisions for a year. 

It was not a gay party upon which that morning 



52 SOLEMN FAREWELLS. [1492. 

sun looked down. Every man was filled with a sense 
of die awfulness of the enterprise. Columbus had 
gone to church, and had taken 'the communion. The • 
officers and sailors had followed his example. Palos 
was full of weeping men and w^omen, for there was 
scarcely a household that did not have some relative 
on the squadron that sailed out into the unknown 
sea. At last, committing themselves to the special 
care of Heaven, with tears and forebodings, in de- 
pression and sadness, they started out in pursuance 
of the orders of their sovereigns, and under the stern 
command of the determined Columbus. 




CHAPTER XIII. 



A NEW WORLD DISCOVERED. 




OOK at the little fleet as it sets out on its 
momentous voyage. There is the Santa 
Maria, with the flag of the admiral at its 
head, a little vessel of but a hundred tons ; and there 
are the Pinta and the Nina, still smaller. They were 
to go to the Canary Islands first, and then to steer 
right westward. They did not know it, but they 
could hardly have taken a longer course across the 
ocean. 

Columbus must have felt very solemn for another 
reason. He knew that his men did not want to go 
with him, and he could not tell how soon they would 
refuse to obey his commands. At any moment they 
might mutiny, and then he would be powerless, if 
he should not lose his life. There were good reasons 

53 



54 ON THE LONG VOYAGE. [1492. 

for such fears as these. One day the Pinta's rudder 
would not work, and it seemed that some one on 
board had broken it, hoping thus to compel Columbus 
to send the vessel back to Europe. It was difficult 
to repair the break, and a delay at the Canaries of 
some weeks was made necessary. The volcano of 
Teneriffe happened to pour forth its smoke at the 
time, and the sailors took it as an evil omen. As 
soon as possible, therefore, Columbus left those 
islands and pressed westward. 

August passed day by day, and the three ships 
were not beyond the Canaries ; September was gone, 
and yet there was no hope of soon seeing Cathay. 
On the twenty-fifth of that month one of the sailors 
had, indeed, thought he saw land, but he was mis- 
taken, and the hopes that he had roused were dashed. 
The men threatened to mutiny. Columbus was afraid 
to let them know how far they had sailed. He 
therefore kept two records of the voyage, one of 
which was true and the other false. On the false 
record, which was the only one the sailors saw, the 
distance was set down day by day much less than it 
really was. I am sorry to have to confess this for 
the brave admiral. The situation became threaten- 



1492.] LAND DISCOVFLRED. 55 

ing as well as hopeless, but still Columbus kept 
right on ! 

He was not rewarded until Friday morning, 
October 12, when, as the sun rose from the sea, 
tokens of land appeared in the distance. Full day- 
light showed that the ship was off the shore of an 
island, and that its naked inhabitants were gazing in 
astonishment at the sight of the approaching vessel. 
Then the crew thronged around their commander, 
kissing his hands and begging favors, or asking 
humble pardon for the misconduct that they had 
been guilty of on the long voyage. 1 

For seventy days the frail vessels had tossed on 
the treacherous sea ; but now they lay at peace in 
transparent waters beneath bright skies, surrounded 
by all the luxuries of a warm climate. The mari- 
ners considered themselves the favorites of Heaven, 
though they had thought themselves its outcasts. 

With evidence of religious gratitude, Columbus 
landed, and took possession of the country in the 
names of Ferdinand and Isabella. Throwing himself 
on the earth he gave thanks to God, with tears of 
joy, as he kissed the long-looked-for soil of a New 
World ! 



56 LETTERS TO THE GRAND CHAM. 

Columbus did not then know where he was. 
Neither do we know. There are several islands 
on which he may have landed. I find among the 
Bahamas, Cat and Watling's Islands, and from their 
situation I am inclined to think that Watling's was 
the one that Columbus landed on. He said it was 
called Guanahani, but he named it San Salvador, that 
is, Holy Saviour. He did not doubt but it was one 
of the many islands near Cipango that he had seen 
on the map sent to him by Toscanelli. 

It is rather amusing to know that when Columbus 
landed he was so sure that he had reached Cipango, 
that he sent by the natives certain letters that Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella had given him to present to the 
Grand Cham ! 




CHAPTER XIV. 




COLUMBUS AT HOME AGAIN. 

E cannot imagine the joy that Cohimbus felt 
when he stepped ashore and said to himself, 
"I was right: the Indies do lie to the 
westward from Spain ; I can now give to my sov- 
ereigns the wealth that I promised ! " Though he 
was doubtless in haste to give the intelligence of his 
success to those w^ho had sorrowed so much as they 
saw him sail away with their friends and neighbors, 
he did not immediately return to Spain. 

He occupied three months in cruising among the 
Bahama Islands, and the West Indies, as they are 
still called on account of the mistake that Columbus 
made in thinking that he had reached the shores of 
Asia. He sailed thus along the coast of Cuba, 
which he was sure must be Asia, and then set out 

57 



58 THE VOYAGE HOMEWARD. [1493. 

on the return voyage to Palos. He carried with 
him some of the natives to show to his countrymen. 
He called them Indians, because he thought he had 
reached India. He took also specimens of the birds 
and of the products of the islands. 

It was not until the fourth of January, 1493, that 
Columbus thought best thus to set sail for Palos 
again. The winter is said to have been very stormy 
on the Atlantic, and the little vessels were tossed 
about in a most frightful manner. At times Colum- 
bus, brave as he was, feared that he should never 
see Spain again. He was specially troubled at the 
thought that the story of his wonderful discovery 
would never be known. Finally he wrote an ac- 
count of the vo)-age on parchment, and wrapped it in 
a waxed cloth. This he enclosed in the middle of a 
cake of wax, and put the parcel in a barrel, which 
he cast into the sea. He gave his men to under- 
stand that he was performing a religious vow. 

His anxiety was so great that this did not satisfy 
him, and he prepared another account in the same 
way, and placed it on the high poop of his caravel, 
so that if he should himself be swallowed up by the 
angry waves his story might by chance float to shore. 



1493.] A VISIT TO A KING. 59 

In spite of all the clangers of this rough voyage, 
the Pinta at last reached land, but it was off the 
harbor of Lisbon and not Palos. Nothing but bad 
weather would have made Columbus stop at Lisbon, 
for it is in Portugal, and you know that the king 
of that country had not been willing to help in the 
beginning of the enterprise. 

However, Columbus was obliged to cast anchor, 
on account of the storm. He put the best face on 
the matter, by sending w^ord that he had arrived, and 
asking permission to go to Palos. The truth is, he 
was afraid to remain at Lisbon because there was a 
report that his vessel was loaded with gold that he 
had found in the rich new world. 

I cannot tell you of all the honors that were now 
poured on the poor mariner who a few months before 
had been begging to be listened to. There were 
acclamations of the people, the sounds of drum and 
fife, and finally, most remarkable of all, an invitation 
from the king to visit hirti at Valparaiso. Though it 
was but thirty miles to this place, it took Columbus 
two days to get there over the bad roads, and in the 
rain that poured down on him. 

The king treated the great discoverer with the 



6o REJOICINGS IN PALOS. [1493. 

Utmost consideration, and listened to his account of 
the voyage with deep interest. When the story had 
been told, Columbus was escorted back to his ship by 
a long train of cavaliers. 

A few days later, in the middle of March, he found 
himself the object of still more interest in the harbor 
of Palos, from which he had so dolefully sailed out 
seven months before. 

The shops were closed, the bells rang, every one 
was in a state of excitement, and there was such a 
tumult as Palos had never known. Everybody seemed 
to forget the difficulties that they had put in the way 
of Columbus when he started. With one accord they 
threw up their hats and shouted their loud accla- 
mations as they followed his steps through the city. 

There was a man in Palos who did not hear these 
sounds with joy. It was the commander of one of the 
ships that had gone out with Columbus. He had 
deserted his admiral as soon as he was certain that 
land had been discovered, and had hastened back to 
Spain to get the honor himself. When he entered the 
harbor of Palos at last, he found that the place was in 
an uproar of excitement, and that Columbus, who 
ought to have received it, was enjoying the honors ! 
It is said that he died of vexation. 



CHAPTER XV. 



A ROYAL WELCOME. 




KRDINAND and Isabella were at Barcelona, 
a city on the Mediterranean, several hundred 
miles away. Between the two places there 
were many mountains and rivers and plains to be 
crossed, if one were to go thither by land. Columbus 
had certainly sailed enough for the time. When, 
therefore, the king and queen invited him to come 
to them to tell again his wondrous stor)', you may 
be sure he did not hesitate to take a mule, for though 
that animal is slow, he Is steadier and surer than the 
blue waves of the Mediterranean. 

We can hardly Imagine this journey. " Don 
Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 
and Governor of the Islands discovered in the Indies," 
was on his way to court to meet the great rulers of 

6i 



62 A WELCOME FROM THE PEOPLE. [1493. 

a rich land. He had with him six Indians, whose 
swarthy faces and strange garments added to the 
interest of the people as he passed slowly along. 
Then there were the curiosities, the birds and fruits, 
that had come from the New World. 

Women who had never ventured farther from 
home than the nearest parish church, children to 
whom the whole world was new, men who had heard 
that a wild and perhaps crazy sailor had a year before 
set out to risk his life on the western sea, — all these 
crowded around the band as it drew its little length 
over the high mountains, forded the streams, probably 
flooded by the spring thaws and rains, and traced 
the dull road from Palos and Seville to distant 
Barcelona. 

How many times, think you, did Columbus have 
to stop to tell his tale to the local dignitaries on the 
route ? How his heart must have swelled with ex- 
ultant delight as he pressed with difficulty through 
the excited crowds that thronged the roads ! When 
at last he entered Barcelona, about the middle of the 
bright and genial month of April, as the hidalgos and 
courtiers came out to welcome him, he must have 
felt much as an ancient Roman general felt at the 
moment of his triumph ! 



THANKSGIVING AT IJARCELONA. 63 

The sovereigns had ordered their throne to be 
set out before the \vhole people, under a golden 
canop)'. It was a triumph for them as well as 
for Columbus. There they waited, as Columbus, 
mounted on a gayly equipped charger, made his way 
through the countless multitude in the streets. As 
he approached the throne, he offered to kiss the 
royal hands, but Ferdinand and Isabella hesitated to 
permit such an act from one who seemed so far 
above ordinary mortals. They raised him from his 
knees and gave him a seat by them as he told his 
story. When it was done they sank on the ground, 
clasped their hands to heaven, and, with joyous 
tears led the multitude in thanks to God for his 
wonderful providence. The choir broke forth with 
the Te Deum, and each Spaniard in the throng felt 
that he had tasted heavenly delights, so devout did 
every one feel. 

The triumph of Columbus was long, but it came 
to an end. Then his active mind was occupied with 
plans for other voyages. He would go to rescue the 
holy sepulcher ; he would go again to the new land ; 
he would gain gold and slaves and honors for himself 
and for his sovereigns and for the church, \\1iat 



64 



GRAND ASPIRATIONS. 



visions did not rise before his eyes as he thought of 
the deed he had done, and of what might yet be 
accomphshed ! 

Yet neither Cohimbus nor Ferdinand, nor the 
Spanish people, nor the Pope, nor any of the poten- 
tates to whom the news came, knew at all that a New^ 
World had been found. They thought that Columbus 
had fallen upon the side of Cipango that had not 
before been seen. That w^as W'Onderful enough. 




CHAPTER XVI. 




COLUMBUS MAKES MORE VOYAGES. 

F course the news that Columbus had crossed 
Ocean spread quickly over Europe. There 
were merchants who carried it; there were 
travelers ever on the lookout for strano-e facts; 
there were learned men, just as alert then as they 
are now to ask and tell information; and there were 
ministers at the different courts whose special busi- 
ness it was to report to their own sovereigns what 
they could that might be of interest or advantage. 
There was at the court in those days a man 
bearing the rather strange name, Peter Martyr, who 
had many friends in distant places. They had no 
newspapers, and could get news from foreign lands 
only by letters. So Peter Martyr, who loved to write 
letters, turned reporter, and sent the great news of 

65 



66 PETER MARTYR WRITES LETTERS. [1493. 

the day from Barcelona in many directions. He was 
a man of less than forty years of age, and had a 
good reputation for learning. He went directly to 
the great Admiral, and got from his mouth the 
information that he put in his letters. How inter- 
esting those letters must have been to Peter Martyr's 
friends ! 

Genoa heard the great news, — Genoa that, as we 
have been told, had not listened to her own Colum- 
bus when he asked for help to make the voyage ! 
England heard it ; and another Italian, John Cabot, 
was inspired with a wish to make discoveries in the 
Ocean Sea himself. King Henry the Seventh said 
of Columbus, that the discoverer was a thing more 
divine than human, and regretted that he had not 
himself been the patron of the successful voyage. 

There was no difficulty now in getting men and 
ships to go to the Indies. On the 25th of Septem- 
ber that followed the grand reception at Barcelona, 
the sun again rose on a fleet that had been fitted 
out to sail westward ; but it was not three small 
caravels. There were three great ships of burden, 
and fourteen caravels, all impatient to be off. What 
a hurrying there was, as the friends came to bid 



1493.] THE SECOND VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS. 67 

farewell to those who were departing ! The sordid 
speculator and the earnest minister of religion, the 
mere adventurer and the bronzed navigator, were 
going, and each was a center of joyous interest ; 
while the navigator himself was the object of the 
intensest curiosity. The fleet sailed gayly out of 
the harbor, followed by the good wishes of hun- 
dreds, and blessed by the bright smiles of heaven. 
It was supposed that in a few weeks or months it 
would return freighted with untold riches. Such 
was the great contrast that Columbus experienced. 
On the first departure even his friends shrank from 
him, and no one wished to give him aid ; now all 
were proud to help him as much as possible. 
Twelve hundred men went with him this time. 

It was three years before Columbus saw Spain 
again. During the time of his absence he explored 
the islands, founded a town, and, alas ! made the 
first w^ar with the natives, whom he had come to 
convert to the true religion. W'hen he returned 
he carried with him to Spain the first slaves that 
had been taken from America to Europe. It was 
not thought at all wrong in those days to catch 
men and women, and sell them for slaves, and Co- 



6S THE THIRD VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS. [1498. 

lumbus was not the only captain who did such 
things. 

When Columbus w^as at home this time he heard, 
probably, that the king of Portugal was more desir- 
ous than ever to discover a way to India around the 
Cape of Good Hope, and that in the summer of 
1497 he had sent out one Vasco da Gama on an 
expedition down the coast of Africa for the purpose. 
Meantime, at the end of May, in the year 1498, 
Columbus himself sailed back to America for the 
third time. When his ships started out of the har- 
bor of San Lucar, from which they sailed then, Vasco 
da Gama was safely anchored in the distant port 
of Calicut, in India. This w^as a town in , Madras. 
It w^as a place of great importance at the time. It 
was not Calcutta, the capital of British India, and 
of Benp-al, which is hundreds of miles farther east. 

The commerce of the world had a new channel. 
Its course was completely changed. It w^as no longer 
necessary for men to take the old journey across 
the continents to India. Da Gama had passed the 
stormy cape in the November before Columbus 
started on his third voyage, but of course the great 
fact was not known in Spain, for the expedition did 
not reach Europe again until September, 1499. 



1498.] COLUMBUS SEES THE MAINLAND. 69 

It was on his third voyage that Columbus first 
saw the mainland of the Western Continent; but we 
shall learn that an Englishman had seen it before 
him. Columbus came upon the coast of South 
America. He was in the Gulf of Paria, into which 
the Oronoco River enters by three mouths. 

There he heard the great waves roaring in the 
night, and thought it was the water of the four 
rivers of Paradise mentioned in the- Bible as flowino- 
out to water the earth. He still supposed that he 
had reached Asia, however; but we know that it 
was America. His success raised enemies about 
whom I do not like to read. He was actually sent 
back to Spain in chains like a wicked murderer or 
robber. Doubtless Columbus was not a good mana- 
ger of affairs, and he may have made some mistakes, 
but this treatment seems quite too severe. Such is 
the style in which he arrived at the scene of his 
former triumphs, in 1501. 

The people who had thronged around Columbus 
on his return from the first voyage proved true to 
him now. They showed so much resentment at his 
base treatment that Ferdinand was obliged to take 
off his chains; but he refused to restore his oflfices 



70 VOYAGES TO CALICUT. [1501. 

and honors. All this did not crush the stout-hearted 
man. He wrote to the Pope that he still held to his 
determination to extend the Christian religion, and 
to take the sepulcher of Christ from the Saracens, 
and he constantly urged his sovereigns to assist him 
in the pious enterprise. 

There was nothing in such a plan that in those 
days could be thought silly or visionary. Columbus 
had seen the Saracens conquered in Granada, and 
he thought there was no reason why they could not 
be overcome in Palestine, if only the Christians w^ere 
determined enough. He had a great deal of faith 
and pluck, we know. 

I have told you that it was on his return from 
the third voyage that Columbus heard of the success 
of Vasco da Gama. He also was told that another 
bold Portuguese had gone over the same track, and 
had returned with his ships full of the rich articles 
for which the Indies were famed. Everybody was 
talking about Calicut and the Indies, and Columbus 
was himself excited anew on the subject. You know 
that they had at first aroused his ambition. The 
gums and spices, the ivory and silk, the amber and 
porcelain, that the Portuguese had brought to their 



1502.] FOURTH VOYAGE OF^ COLUMBUS. 71 

sovereign might be found, if Columbus could discover 
a certain strait running through the "island" that 
stopped the way. He was quite sure that such a pas- 
sage existed not far from the regions he had visited. 

By one argument and another Columbus man- 
aged to excite the cupidity of Ferdinand, and on 
the ninth of May, 1502, he found himself master 
of a new fleet on his wav over seas aeain. This 
voyage proved fruitless, and after many sufferings 
the admiral returned to Spain broken by age and 
worn out by hardships. He reached San Lucar, not 
far from Cadiz, in November, 1504. His money af- 
fairs were in confusion. He was himself heart- 
broken. After he had added its briorhtest eem to 
the crown of his sovereigns, he found himself cast 
off as useless. 

Queen Isabella, his constant friend, died in 1504, 
and Columbus followed her on the twentieth of 
May, 1506. Ferdinand seems to have repented of 
his ill-treatment of his great subject, and erected a 
monument to his memory at Seville, on which he 
credited him with having given his country a new 
world. It would have been better if he had made 
his life pleasanter. 



CHAPTER XVII. 




INTEREST IN DISCOVERY EXTENDS. 

EANTIME the interest In American explo- 
rations had greatly spread, though the 
country was not yet called America. In 
England the Wars of the Roses, as they are called, 
closed in 1485, and the people began to send out 
vessels for one purpose or another. They had heard 
of Brazil, and they sent vessels to find it ; they re- 
membered old stories about the Island of the Seven 
Cities, which was said to lie to the westward, and 
they searched for that. Besides these ventures, there 
were others carried on by John Cabot and Sebastian, 
his son, under authority of the king. John Cabot was 
the first to see the coast of North America. He 
sailed some seven hundred leagues, and thought he 
had at last actually reached the country of the Grand 
72 



1497.] CABOT DISCOVERS AMERICA. 



73 



Cham that so many had longed to see. He landed 
in 1497, but we cannot tell exactly where, — per- 
haps it was on the dreary shores of Labrador, or 
on Cape Breton Island, — and took possession of 
the land in the name of King Henry the Seventh. 
He coasted along the shores, and then returned 
to Bristol, where the king gave him much honor; 
but litde good did his voyage do England, except 
to make a foundation for a future claim to land 
on our continent. 

Spain first, and then Portugal, sent out Amerigo 
Vespucci, an astronomer from Venice, who made 
several voyages between 1499 and 1505. Finally his 
name was given to the continent by a geographer 
who seems not to have reflected that Columbia would 
have been a more appropriate name for it. Caspar 
Cortereal was another adventurer sent out by Portu- 
gal. He went in 1500, and brouorht back a careo 
of natives that he sold as slaves. He went out the 
next year on a second voyage, and was not heard 
of again. 

Ponce de Leon was a Spaniard who was with 
Columbus on his second voyage. He was especially 
interested in the Fountain of Youth. Ponce sailed 



74 THE PACIFIC OCEAN SEEN. [1513. 

in 15 12. He missed the Fountain, but discovered 
Florida, which he named because he found it on 
Palm Sunday, — which in his language is Pasqua 
Florida, — or because it seemed to him a land 
of flowers. Another companion of Columbus was 
Vasco Nuiiez de Balboa, who crossed the Isthmus 
of Darien. He was the first European to see the 
great Pacific Ocean. He called it Mcj^ del Sitr, 
or South Sea, a name that it kept for a long time. 
This was in 1513. 

These are the only names about which I shall 
have much to say, for I should tire you if I told you 
about all the adventurers w^ho sailed for America in 
the early times. There were Cortes, who cruelly 
conquered Mexico ; and Magellan, who was helped 
by Spain to fit out a fleet to seek the passage through 
our continent to India. Magellan was the first to 
sail in the Pacific Ocean. 

There were Verrazano, an Italian of doubtful 
character, who was employed by the French, and 
probably visited New York bay and other portions 
of the coast>; Pizarro, who conquered Peru, and 
robbed the inhabitants of large quantities of their 
gold ; and Cabeza de Vaca and Francisco Coronado, 



THE OTHER EXPEORERS. 



75 



who explored Colorado, Arizona, and the Pacific 
coast of the present United States. 

There are many stirring tales connected with 
each of these names ; but we must not stop to 
tell them. They are found in larger books, which 
you will have the pleasure of reading one of these 
days. 




CHAPTER XVIII. 



THE AMERICANS THE EXPLORERS FOUND. 




HE English had been the first to see the 
real continent of America, but they did not 
know much about it, and they did not hesi- 
tate to accept the belief of those who had said that 
India was the country that had been discovered. 
They therefore also called the men whom they saw 
Indians. 

This was a mistake ; but the question has not 
been answered : Who were the men who were found 
on the continent ? Perhaps they came to America 
from Asia. There is a point away off to the north- 
west, as I have told you, at which America and Asia 
come very close together. It is more important for 
us to learn what the inhabitants looked like and how 
they acted, than to know where they came from. 
76 



INDIAN NAMI':S. 77 

They have left their names all over North America. 
There is Erie, which was the name of one of their 
tribes ; and there is Huron, which was the name of 
another. I read of Shawneetown in Illinois, which 
tells me that the Shawnee tribe once li\^ed in that 
region ; and there are Pottaw^atomie counties in Iowa 
and Kansas, w^hich bear the name of another. There 
are the Miami River in Ohio, the Neenah in Wiscon- 
sin, Oneida Lake in New York, the city Tuscaloosa 
in Alabama, of Natchez in Mississippi, the Pasmotank 
river in North Carolina, the Sac in Missouri, the 
Housatonic river in Massachusetts, the Tunxis In 
Connecticut, the Tippencanoe in Indiana, and many 
other towns, rivers, lakes, and other objects which 
bear names that remind us of the early inhabitants. 
Would that there were even more of the musical 
ones, and fewer Centrevilles and South Solons and 
Skull Bones and Tombstones ! 

It would take a large history to tell the names 
of all the Indian tribes, and to describe the places in 
which they lived. Let us look at a few of them. In 
the north there were some accustomed to the great 
cold of such regions as Greenland, and Labrador, 
who were dull and stupid, living on fish and such 



7^ IN THE COLORADO CANONS. 

creatures as they could kill with their spears and 
arrows. Farther south the people were more intelli- 
gent. They sometimes built substantial houses of 
stone and sun-dried bricks, and w^ere able to weave 
cloth and to make pottery. 

In Colorado, Arizona, and Utah we find now 
stone houses perched far up on the rocky sides of 
great canons, — those deep gorges that streams have 
worn out by long ages of steady flow. In these the 
inhabitants could easily keep their women and 
children safe from all danger from enemies. Indians 
did not usually build stone houses, but made the 
least protection they could. They put saplings in 
the ground, and, pulling their tops nearly together, 
covered them w^ith skins of animals, or with bark, 
leaving a hole at the top for the smoke of their fires 
to rise and escape. This was a wigwam. 

They are often called red or copper-colored, be- 
cause they are accustomed to color their bodies, but 
they are really brown. If they lived in a warm 
climate, they liked to be troubled with but little 
clothing ; but in the north they supplied themselves 
with enough furs and other coverings to make them- 
selves warm. Though they were very hardy, they 



HOW INDIANS DRESS AND EAT. 79 

wished to be comfortable. Like many other men and 
women, the Indians Hked gay colors, and ornamented 
their bodies and clothinof with the brilliant feathers 
of birds, and with shells and stones of attractive hues. 
When the men hunted and fished, the women duo- 
the oTound, so far as they ever did anything of that 
kind, and planted the seeds and gathered the harvest 
of nuts or acorns or Indian corn. 

Of course their cooking was very simple. They 
could roast their venison and quails as well as we can, 
and probably the)' tasted as good to them as our 
game tastes to us ; but they did not have stoves and 
ovens, and pots and pans of metal, and so there were 
many things they could not do in their kitchens. 
Indeed, their kitchens were not apartments by them- 
selves, for all the operations of the household were 
carried on in the only room the wigwam had. 




M^^^^ 



CHAPTER XIX. 




THE FIRST WARS WITH THE SAVAGES. 

T was not very long after Columbus reached 
the Bahama Islands that war began be- 
tween the Ignorant savages of the woods 
and prairies and the civilized white men who pro- 
fessed to have sailed westward '' to extend the 
Christian religion." That was a great mistake. 
Civilized men in those days thought that when they 
found any land not owned by a Christian prince 
they were at liberty to take possession of all it con- 
tained. They did not seem to reflect that its human 
inhabitants had any rights at all. This was not 
very Christian ; but it took men a long, long time 
to learn what Christian dealing with others meant, — 
if, indeed, they know it to-day. 

The result of this w^as that the poor, ignorant 
80 



HOW THE INDIAN BECAME SLY. 8l 

Indian thought that all the whites who came to his 
land were his enemies. He saw plainly that they 
knew much more than he about many things, and 
he determined to do his best to protect himself 
and his squaws and his pappooses, as he called his 
women and children, from danger! 

He knew that there was litde use in his attempt- 
ing to fight openly with his bow and arrows against 
men who could pour forth such terrible blasts of 
smoke and shot from their wonderful euns, and so 
he decided to be as sly as he could. He would 
creep up behind the white man and kill him when 
he was not looking ! 

He felt sure that the white man was determined 
to kill all the Indians he could, and therefore he 
said that he would kill all the white men that 
he could ; and he would do it in the only way 
possible or safe for him. This is the reason why 
the men who came from Europe very soon reported 
that the Indians were cunning and sly and treach- 
erous. 

It is sad to think that this was the way in 
which the Intelliorent white men beean to treat the 
savage Indian ; but it is true. It is probably true 



82 THE MOUND-BUILDERS. 

also that as the Indian found that he could over- 
come his new enemy only by cunning, he grew 
more and more sly and treacherous. That is natu- 
ral. The Indian was brave, and perhaps he was 
haughty ; certainly he was eloquent and very fiery 
when he was excited, but usually he did not care 
to waste his words, and spoke short and briefly. 
Often he was true to the white man, but he had 
very little encouragement to treat him well. 

The Indians, — or some still earlier inhabitants of 
our country, — have left many mounds and earth- 
works which show by the articles that we can now 
dig out of them that at some time there were in- 
habitants here who probably cultivated the earth 
more than the Indians. They worked in stone and 
bone, and shell and copper, and could make very good 
earthen vessels. It is to be hoped that in future 
years something more definite may be learned from 
these mounds, many of which have not been ex- 
plored. Perhaps some boy who reads these words 
will be the one to make discoveries about the 
" Mound-Builders," as these people are called. 



CHAPTER XX. 




THE SPANIARDS LOOK FOR GOLD. 

T was man)' )'ears after Cabot saw the conti- 
nent of America before any other Enghsh- 
men came to explore it farther, and in the 
mean time the Spanish and French sent out men and 
vessels to make discoveries. One of these adven- 
turers, Francisco Orellana, heard that there was on 
the continent which we call South America a reeion 
called El Dorado, the Golden Land. 

As he had but little gold, he started bravely out 
to find it. He entered the mouth of the Amazon 
river, and sailed some three thousand miles on its 
waters ; but he had a terrible time. The Indians 
killed some of his men, and the others could not 
make their way back again, after they had been far 
up the river ; and they found so little food that 



84 THE AMAZON DISCOVERED. [1541. 

they were forced to eat their saddles and their very 
shoes. 

However, Orellana reached Spain at last, and told 
great stories of temples roofed with gold, and of a 
nation of " Amazons," or women warriors, like those 
that we read of in Greek mythology. His name was 
given to the river, though it was also called the 
Amazon, and he was sent back with much honor and 
power to explore it. He did not live long after he 
reached the Amazon the second time. 

Among the followers of the cruel Pizarro there 
was Fernando de Soto, who tried to make him treat 
the natives kindly. De Soto received a share of the 
gold that was won by Pizarro's despotic brutality, 
however, and went home to Spain very rich. King 
Charles the Fifth received him much as Ferdinand 
had welcomed Columbus, and sent him back to con- 
quer a vast territory reaching from the Atlantic 
indefinitely westward, — perhaps to the Pacific, which 
he called Florida. This was the country which De 
Vaca and Coronado had described, — the great inte- 
rior land which is in our day rapidly filling up with 
inhabitants. 

History tells us that Spain was stirred up in a 



1538.] DE SOTO IN FLORIDA. 85 

way that had not been known since the second voyage 
of Columbus, if, indeed, there had been such an 
excitement since the times of the Crusades. Every- 
body, rich, poor, high, low, honest, and dishonest, 
rushed to enlist under the banner of the commander 
who would certainly, they believed, lead them to the 
Fountain of Youth and the marvelous Land of 
Gold. 

Crowds set sail in the spring of 1538, from San 
Lucar, and after a long voyage landed at Tampa Bay. 
They wandered about through the uninteresting 
swamps and sands of western Florida, imtil winter 
came. Then they wanted to go home, but De Soto 
said no. The Indians kept pointing to the west, as 
if the Land of Gold was always before the dispirited 
explorers ; and at the end of another season they 
found themselves at some place southwest of the 
present site of Selma, Alabama, which they called 
Mauvila. There they had a bloody battle with the 
natives. 

They wandered about until May, 1542, when De 
Soto died. They were then on the shores of the 
Mississippi, and beneath its waves the leader was 
buried, so that his body might not be found by the 



86 THE MISSISSIPPI DISCOVERED. [1541. 

Indians. It was more than a year before the remnant 
of the company that had so ga)4y set out from San 
Lucar sadly took shelter in a harbor of Cuba. They 
had found no gold ; but the great river of North 
America was discovered, and Spain had established 
a good claim to the honor and the rights of dis- 
covery. We cannot be quite sure that no European 
had seen the Mississippi before ; but it is certain 
that it was discovered by a Spaniard. 








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CHAPTER XXI. 




GRAND TIMES IN EUROPE. 

LL this time France had not been idle, but 
she had been making explorations in a 
different part of the New World. Verra- 
zano had been sent out by Francis I., in 1524, and 
had, as we know, visited northern coasts. He was 
the first explorer sent out by a French king. 

Jacques Cartier was likewise sent out ten years 
later with the same number of men that Columbus 
took on his first voyage, but with only two vessels. 
He was to explore '' New France," as the country 
was vaguely called, with no reference to the claims 
of former explorers. 

Cartier landed on the coast of Labrador, after a 
short voyage, and solemnly took possession of the 
country in the name of the king of France, by 

87 



S8 CARTIER AT MONTREAL. [1535. 

planting a cross. Probably he cared little whether 
Cabot had ever seen Labrador or not. He next went 
into the bay of the St. Lawrence, without knowing 
that it was the mouth of a river, however, and by 
September of the same year he was back again in 
France. 

In 1535 Cartier was in the same region again. 
This time he sailed up the St. Lawrence, sure that 
he had found the strait that was to give him a 
passage through the continent to Cipango. He 
gave the name "Mount Royal" to the spot on 
which "Montreal" was afterward built. The two 
words mean the same thing, as you will see if you 
think of " regal," and remember that the letter £- 
was formerly often pronounced like y. 

Cartier went home again in 1536, carrying back 
ten chiefs whom he had stolen from their native 
woods. He returned to the New World, however, 
in 1 54 1, but at last became discouraged and gave 
up all hope of making any permanent settlement. 

These were grand times in Europe. Men every- 
where were full of great projects ; there were great 
kings in the different countries, and they felt the 
influence of the enterprise that stimulated their sub- 



1520.] THE GREAT KINGS MEET. 89 

jects. You may read of a meeting of the kings in 
France about twenty years after Vasco da Gama 
had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. It was 
held in the flowery month of June, 1520, four years 
before Verrazano had been sent out by one of the 
kings who Avas present. 

This was called the Field of the Cloth of Gold, 
because everything about it w^as so rich and gay. 
There were present Henry the Eighth of England, 
Francis the First of France, and Charles the Fifth of 
Germany. Many of the courtiers spent so much 
gold coin on their clothes and armor, and on their 
attendants and equipage, that they were kept in pov- 
erty all the rest of their lives. It was vain splendor, 
but it was not unlike much of the grandeur of the 
times. It was not the only expensive enterprise 
that came to nothing. 

In Italy there was another great ruler. His 
name w^as Leo the Tenth, and he did so much for 
the age in which he lived that it has ever since 
been called, after him. the "Age of Leo the Tenth," 
as thouorh nothinof crreater could be said about it. 
He was the Pope. He was not present at the 
Field of the Cloth of Gold. He was a patron of 



90 WHAT MARTIN LUTHER DID. [1529. 

literature and art, and did not send out explorers 
as the kings of France, Spain, and England did. 
He certainly helped to make the age a grand one. 

At about the same time an important event 
occurred in Germany which was destined to have 
much influence upon American affairs. The division 
between Catholics and Protestants was then made by 
one Martin Luther, a priest, who protested against 
what he thouo^ht was wrono- in the church of which 
Leo the Tenth was the head. The name " Prot- 
estant " was not used until 1529. 

Henry the Eighth and the English became Prot- 
estants, while France and Spain remained Catholic. 
The strife between Protestants and Catholics grew 
very hot, and it was carried everywhere that they 
went over the earth. Each party thought itself right 
and the other wrong. 

The first explorers of America had all been 
Catholics, but now the Protestants began to take 
part in sending out expeditions. 



CHAPTER XXII. 




BAD WORK IN FLORIDA. 

HE first of the Protestants to come to 
America were French, for there were some 
Protestants In France. They were called 
Huguenots. They reached the coast of what is 
now South Carolina. The region was included in 
Florida, which, you know, was claimed by Spain. 
It was in the spring of 1562. The emigrants were 
charmed by the odors of the flowers, and by the 
beauties of nature all around. Like Cartier, they 
took possession of the country in the name of the 
king of France. They built a fort, but accomplished 
little more. 

Many returned to France, but some never saw 
home again. They died after great sufferings. There 
was a war then between Catholics and Protestants. 

91 



92 THE FRENCH IN FLORIDA. [1564. 

It had begun soon after these settlers had left home, 
and it was that which put an end to their efforts. 

Another party arrived, however, from France, in 
1564, and landed on the banks of the St. John's River, 
which we still include in Florida. It had no more 
success than the one that had come before ; and all 
were about to return home, when a fleet appeared 
in the distance bringing more men. This revived 
their failing courage ; but it was only for a time. 
The new-comers were followed almost immediately 
by a number of ships sent out from Spain by Philip 
the vSecond, son of Charles the Fifth. It had the cruel 
orders to sweep the Protestant settlement from the 
face of the earth. The French were considered as 
pirates by their enemies, the Spaniards ; and pirates 
did not deserve much mercy then, any more than 
they now do. Many French sailors had, indeed, pre- 
tended to be Protestants, and under the mask of 
religion had captured ships of the Spaniards, treating 
their owners wdth great cruelty. 

The commander of the Catholic expedition was 
one Menendez. He had more than twenty-five 
hundred men with him, and he began a town on 
September 3, which he named St. Augustine. This 



1565.] COLONISTS SLAUGHTERED. 93 

proved the first permanent settlement on land now 
within the limits of the United States. 

Menendez announced the purpose of his visit, 
and the commander of the French boldly sailed out 
to oppose him. The attacking vessels were destroyed 
by a storm, and IMenendez then broke up the French 
settlement, leaving an inscription saying that the 
men had been slaughtered, not as Frenchmen, but as 
Lutherans. This was in 1565. 

Three years afterward another French fleet arrived, 
with orders to avenge the slaughter of the Protest- 
ants. The Spanish fort was attacked, and all Its in- 
mates put to the sword, except a few who were 
hanged, with an Inscription over them, burned with 
a hot Iron into a piece of pine, " Not as Spaniards, 
but as Traitors, Robbers, and Murderers." This 
done, the French fleet sailed back again. The land 
remained In the hands of the few Spaniards who had 
not been In the fort. 

Now we have the French claiming New France, — 
stretching from Florida to Newfoundland. The 
Spanish claimed Florida, which, according to them, 
comprised the whole of the continent, under a bull 
of the Pope given to Columbus on his first return 
from the West Indies. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 




THE DAYS OF QUEEN ELIZABETH. 

NGLAND had not clone much in the way 
of looking up new lands In the West since 
Cabot saw the shores that he called Prinia 
Vista, which means First View, wherever they were. 
There were good reasons for this. Henry the Eighth 
had been fully occupied with affairs in England and 
on the continent during his relofn, and his struororle 
with the Pope had called for much attention. His 
son and daughter, Edward the Sixth, and Mary, 
likewise had their hands full near at home. Mary, 
too, had married Philip the Second, king of Spain, 
and did not care to Interfere with the affairs of his 
people in the new country. 

We have come to a different period now. Eliza- 
beth, the strong daughter of Henry the Eighth, stood 

94 



ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA. 95 

at the head of the EngHsh nation. The period has 
been called by her name, so much did she have to 
do with making it a great one, and so much more 
brilliant was it than the ages that had gone before. 
Like her father, Elizabeth was the representative of 
the cause of the Protestants. She was fortunate in 
having about her a remarkable group of public men, 
in all walks of life. 

These men began to think that Spain was gaining 
too much money and land In America. They saw 
that it was from those shores that Philip obtained 
the wealth that enabled him to fight his wars against 
their country and Holland, and they tried to think 
of some plan by which they could overthrow his 
American authority. Everything was in their favor. 

England was not troubled by war, and its thrifty 
people w^ere making money on their farms, and by 
their commerce, which was increasing all the time. 
The land that had formerly been held by the monks 
and the monasteries was distributed among the 
people ; and money was no longer sent out of the 
country to the Pope at Rome. Travelers in England 
can see now some of the erand and beautiful houses 
that the wealthy men put up in the time of this great 
queen. 



96 WISE QUEEN ELIZABETH. 

How could harm be done to Spain ? That was 
the question. Pirates and smugglers might attack 
their settlements on the Atlantic coast, and they 
might rob their ships as they sailed from the West ; 
but that was dangerous, and could effect but little. 

Two daring sailors thought out a new plan. 
They would go around America. One of them de- 
termined to attack the Spanish on the Pacific. The 
vessels there he knew were poorly manned, and the 
ports were protected but little. One of these adven- 
turers was named Drake and the other Frobisher. 
The first was a pirate, the second an explorer, 
though both wanted to get gold. I shall tell you 
about them soon. 

Queen Elizabeth was wise and full of tact. She 
encouraged her subjects to build ships ; she walked 
about the shipyards ; took the hands of the rough 
captains in her own ; and drank their healths as she 
left them. Her cannon thundered farewells as the 
outgoing vessels sailed past her palace, and her 
voice welcomed the worn seamen as they returned 
to tell of the wonders they had seen and the dan- 
gers they had escaped. She encircled their necks 
with golden chains, and made them knights after 



THE SHEPHERD OF THE OCEAN. 97 

their victories were won. She taught her subjects 
that she watched their interests and prized their 
services, and that no good deed done for England 
was to be unrewarded and forgotten. Thus she 
gave them an incentive to carry the flag that she had 
consecrated around the globe, and they carried it. 

Besides all these influences, there was another 
that was very powerful. Englishmen had become 
more learned. We cannot stop here to speak of the 
great wTiters that were printing books in the second 
half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Perhaps you 
have heard of Bacon and Spenser and Hooker and 
Marlowe and Sidney, and of Shakespeare, the greatest 
of all of them. In fact Shakespeare was so great 
that we have never had another equal to him. 

There was only one of the explorers, however, 
who seems to have been touched by this influence. 
He was a literary man himself. His name was 
Raleigh, and he determined to do what he could to 
make his native country mistress of the seas. He 
accomplished a great deal, though it seemed at the 
time that all his ventures had failed. The poet 
Spenser called him the " Shepherd of the Ocean." 



CHAPTER XXIV. 



THE GREAT ENGLISH PIRATE. 




NE of the men who had made plans to sail 
around America was Sir Francis Drake. He 
thought It was an island, though a very big 
one. He had been brought up as a boy among sea- 
men, and thus had become quite familiar with stories 
of adventure and bravery. His father was poor, and 
eked out a livelihood by teaching and reading 
prayers among sailors, under w^arrant of officers of 
the queen. This poverty led the father to send his 
son to sea. 

Sir John Hawkins, the pioneer naval hero of the 
age, the first among the English adventurers, had 
already made great gain by *' smuggling." That is, 
he managed to get goods from other lands Into 
England secretly, without paying the lawful tax to 
the government. 
98 



1567.] ROBBING SPANISH SHIPS. 99 

When he became a pirate, Drake took a step m 
advance of Hawkins ; but before long piracy became 
a popular and lawful business. He sailed out where- 
ever he thought he could find ships well loaded, and 
fought them. Many Spanish ships came to Europe 
with gold. If he could, Drake took all that they 
had on board that he washed, and sailed away, think- 
inor that he had done an honorable deed. 

Drake became acquainted with Haw^kins, of whom 
I just spoke. He had gone to Guinea in 1562 and 
taken three hundred black people to the West 
Indies, where he sold them for slaves. Drake went 
with him on another expedition, and lost everything 
that he had stolen before. 

Then It was that he began to rob Spanish ships. 
He W'as told by a careless chaplain that his acts 
were legal, and that he might well take what he 
could from them, because he had lost so much by 
them. This w^as in 1567. 

In 1572 Queen Elizabeth sent him out on an 
expedition to the West Indies. He went across the 
Isthmus of Darien, and climbed a giant tree which 
stood on a hill. From this perch he looked at the 
Pacific Ocean, and prayed God to permit him some 



I 



lOO DRAKP: starts around the world. [1577. 

day to sail an English ship there. Though he was 
a pirate and a robber, he did not give up praying, 
for, as I ha\^e said, he was taught that piracy and 
such robbery as he committed were not wrong. Af- 
terward he sailed home full of his great project. 
One August Sunday he arrived at Plymouth, in Eng- 
land, and almost everybody hurried out of church to 
see him, — so proud were they of their hero. The 
minister had but two or three left to hear his 
sermon ! 

In 1577 Drake was again ready to sail west- 
ward. This time he went out under the patronage 
of his queen, and took with him a number of nobles 
who wished to "learn the art of navigation," as 
they said ; but who probably thought a good deal 
more of the gold that they might steal from rich 
Spanish vessels that they should find. They sailed 
along the coast of South America until they reached 
Patagonia. 

Drake passed safely through the Straits of Magel- 
lan, and then went along the coast, pillaging Spanish 
towns and vessels, and gaining great sums of 
treasure. He did not stop until he had reached a 
point off the coast of our state of Oregon, when his 



1578.] DRAKE IN CALIFORNIA. lOI 

men grievously complained of being pinched by the 
cold, though it was in June. He then turned about, 
and after sailing some two or three hundred miles 
entered a "fair and good bay" to rest and make 
repairs ; probably the one which still bears his name 
on our maps. It is only a short distance north of 
San Francisco, and is sometimes called Jack's Bay. 

Because the coast w^as lined w^ith w^hite banks 
and cliffs toward the sea, reminding him of the 
*'w^hite cliffs of Albion," Drake called the region 
New Albion, and took possession of it in the name 
of his queen. He engraved her majesty's name on 
a plate, with the date, and fixed it to a fair post. 
Under the plate he nailed an English sixpence, on 
which there was a portrait of Elizabeth. He did 
not fail also to wTite his own name down. 

W'ith so much gold as he had, Drake was afraid 
to sail over the route by which he had gone out, 
and therefore he struck directly across the Pacific, 
and around the Cape of Good Hope. It was on a 
Sunday in September, 1580, that he reached England. 
The queen was proud to dine on board the ship that 
had gone all around the world. She made its com- 
mander a knight, — "Sir" Francis Drake; and she 



I02 DRAKE REACHES ENGLAND. [1580. 

ordered the vessel to be drawn up on land and 
preserved as a memorial of the event and a monu- 
ment to the greatest of English pirates ! Sir Francis 
Drake died on one of his later expeditions, and was 
buried in the sea. A poet wrote in his praise, — 

'• The waves became his winding-sheet, the waters were his tomb ; 
But for his fame the Ocean sea was not sufficient room." 

The Spaniards protested against these acts of 
the great pirate ; but the English laid it down as 
a law of nations that no government could claim a 
continent, either because the Pope had given it, or 
by reason of having built huts here and there on its 
coasts. Other peoples were at liberty to sail in such 
seas as the Pacific, and to plant colonies at places 
that were not inhabited. England was strong enough 
to enforce this law. 

Now, Elizabeth declared, England had all the 
rights that there were on the ocean and on the land, 
in the New World, in spite of any claims that Spain 
might make. No Englishman had ever before this 
sailed all around the earth, and you may imagine 
that it was a great encouragement to all adventurers 
and traders. 







CHAPTER XXV. 

TRYING TO SAIL AROUND AMERICA. 

HREE years before this, in 1576, Queen 
Elizabeth, who had encouraged her sailors 
in every way, had waved her royal hand in 
farewell to the other of the two great navigators of 
whom I have told you, Sir Martin Frobisher. He 
went to the northwest under the patronage of the 
Earl of Warwick, to get gold and find a passage to 
China around the north of our continent; though, 
of course, like the others, he thought America was 
no more than an island, — a large one, perhaps,— 
that stopped the way. 

Frobisher had been obliged to wait fifteen years 
before he could find any one willing to help him fit 
out his fleet. That was much longer than Colum- 
bus had to wait. When at last he started, he 

103 



I04 FINDING FALSE GOLD. [1577. 

sailed bravely across, and left his name on a 
strait in the frozen land. He took possession of the 
region for his queen. England owns it still. 

One voyage did not satisfy him, however, and 
he sailed again, and perhaps a third time. The re- 
gion that he discovered was called Meta Incogfiita^ 
which is the Latin for '* Unknown Bourn" or 
" Limit." He thought it was the coast of Asia. A 
piece of black stone, like seacoal, which he brought 
back, was said by a London alchemist or goldfinder 
to be rich in the precious metal, and when Fro- 
bisher reached the same region a second time he 
wasted two months by loading his ship with the 
black stones. They w^ere found to be almost if not 
quite worthless when they were again examined. 
This was a sad disappointment. 

Nothing seemed to discourage brave Englishmen 
from trying to learn all they could about New- 
foundland, as the New World was called at this time, 
and from making efforts to establish colonies of 
their countrymen there. Two other nobles, courtiers 
of the great queen, were moved to try their for- 
tunes in this way. They were Sir Humphrey Gil- 
bert and Sir Walter Raleigh, who were half-brothers. 



1578.] 



SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT. IO5 



Both of these men were learned and of high char- 
acter. They had fought for Protestantism in France 
and had served in Parhament at home. 

Gilbert once wrote a "discourse" especially to 
prove that there must be such a northwest passage 
to Cathay as Frobisher had sought, and he had 
indeed been the means of inducing that captain to 
make his attempt. The queen gave to Gilbert im- 
portant privileges similar to those that had before 
been granted to Cabot by King Henry the Seventh, 
and he prepared an expedition commissioned to 
establish a colon)'. He saw the great advantages 
that came to Spain from her Western possessions, 
and, like a true patriot, he wished to gain for 
England the same sources of power and wealth. 
He was to establish his settlers at some point 
between the French on the north and the Span- 
iards on the south, and therefore quite distant 
from the Meta Incognita. 

Gilbert searched for a region known as " Nor- 
umbega," for which many others had looked and 
were after^vard to look in vain. He took with him 
a learned man named Parmenius to sing the praises 
of the fair land in Latin verse. Verrazano had 



I06 LOOKING FOR NORUMBEGA. [1578. 

marked it on his map in 1529. Ten years later 
it was thought to be a rich territory reaching 
from New Brunswick to Florida. John Smith con- 
sidered "New England" to be Norumbega, but he 
included Virginia in it. Sometimes it was a great 
town, or an island, on the coast of Maine. Would 
that we could bring Norumbega out of the region 
of fable and romance ! Would that Smith had left 
it, instead of " New England," as the name of that 
part of our country ! 

The ships of Gilbert went out in 1578, but they 
missed land, and were forced to return without suc- 
cess. It was five years before another attempt 
could be made. Then the island of Newfoundland 
was reached, and the name which had before been 
applied to the continent was given to it. It was 
taken possession of in the name of the queen. On 
the voyage home Sir Humphrey was lost, and 
nothing came of his attempt. Mr. Longfellow once 
wrote a poem on this sad event. It is called ^' Sir 
Humphrey Gilbert." In it you will see w^hat a good 
man the poet thought the navigator was. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH'S EFFORTS END IN SMOKE. 




N spite of this ill success, Raleigh was none 
the less determined to "plant" colonies in 
America, as they said in those days. A 
"plant" is something that is expected to grow, and 
this is the reason why a colony was so called. It 
was intended to grow. Raleigh was disappointed in 
his noble expectations, however. The year after poor 
Gilbert w^ent down, Raleigh sent out two ships. 

They reached land off the shores of w^hat is now 
North Carolina, and called it Virginia, because Eliza- 
beth was so fond of being spoken of as the ''virgin" 
queen. The explorers brought back two natives, 
and reported that the country was the most fertile 
in the world, that fruits and game abounded, and 
that the natives w^ere very gentle, loving, and faithful, 

107 



I08 THE FIRST AMERICAN CHILD. [1587. 

and lived after the manner described by the poets 
in speaking of the golden age ! 

Nothing had really been accomplished, but as 
soon as possible another expedition was made ready, 
and a body of one hundred and eighty persons was 
carried over the Atlantic and left on Roanoke Island, 
in the limits of the present state of North Carolina. 
The emigrants suffered a great deal, and took the 
first opportunity to get back to England. Scarcely 
had they left, however, when another party arrived 
to give them help. The commander concluded to 
leave a few sailors behind to keep the place, and 
then hastened to England himself. All whom he 
left were soon killed by the natives. 

In 1587 another party still was on the spot. Not 
long after its arrival the first child of English parents 
that was ever born in America appeared. She was 
Virginia Dare. The colony was left without any 
care until 1590, because in the mean time the atten- 
tion of all England, and especially of Sir Walter 
Raleigh, was fixed on a war with Spain in which a 
tremendous fleet of ships called the " Armada " was 
sent against England. It was almost miraculously 
destroyed, and then it was possible to think again 
of the poor colonists in ''Virginia." 



1590.1 TOBACCO AND POTATOES. IO9 

In the spring of 1590 ships were sent to Roa- 
noke to look after them ; but, alas ! they were not 
to be found ! Little Virginia Dare was gone ; all 
were gone ! The colony was lost. Had the people 
starved slowly to death? Had the Indians killed 
them ? We can only imagine. 

Thus ended another great enterprise. It is 
wonderful how bravely men kept trying to get 
around America, and sail to the Indies, and how 
nothing was dreadful enough to hinder them from 
trying to build homes on our coasts. For a time 
Englishmen were naturally not anxious to try again 
to establish themselves in America. They had not 
gained much thus far. It used to be said that Sir 
Walter Raleigh brought tobacco and potatoes to 
Europe ; but potatoes had been described by Peter 
Martyr se\'enty years before, and we are sure that 
Columbus saw the Indians smoking tobacco when 
he first landed. It had been used in Southern Eu- 
rope long before this, but Raleigh may ha\'e shown 
Englishmen how to smoke it themselves. If so, 
this was all that came immediately from his noble 
efforts, though they did not finally end In smoke. 




CHAPTER XXVII. 




THE ENGLISH KINGS AND QUEENS. 

E have now reached the time when the Eng- 
Hsh accompHshed somethhig in their efforts 
to send men and women to the new coun- 
try, which they had all along claimed was theirs 
by right of Cabot's discovery. We cannot understand 
the history of our continent at this period, or at 
any period, in fact, without knowing much about' 
the history of England at the same time. Much that 
was done here was very closely connected, too, as 
we have already seen, with events in other coun- 
tries of Europe. 

After Queen Elizabeth died the crown passed to 
James, son of Mary the unfortunate Queen of Scot- 
land. Elizabeth had put Mary to death, after keep- 
ing her in prison for twenty years. Thus the Tudor 



THE TUDORS AND STUARTS. Ill 

family of rulers, to which Henry the Eighth and 
Elizabeth belonged, gave way to the Stuart family, 
which was a very old one. 

The first Stuart ancestor came to England from 
France at the time of the conquest by the Normans, 
five hundred years before the reign of King James. 
His son became "steward" of Scotland, and, as the 
office descended to his children, the name was eiven 
to the whole famil)'. It was afterwards spelled 
Steuart, and then Stuart. This was a most unfor- 
tunate family. Its history is very romantic. One 
member of it was Robert Bruce, an ancient kine of 
Scotland, who fought bravely against the English, but 
was terribly defeated at the battle of Bannockburn. 

There were six Stuart sovereigns In England. 
They ruled from 1603 to 17 14, — one hundred and 
eleven years. During this time most of the English 
settlements were made In our country. 

The Stuart family was a good deal older, but 
not so great and strong as the Tudors had been. 
The Tudors were cruel and despotic, and oppressed 
their subjects, and the Stuarts were no better. 
Finally the people took matters Into their own 
hands, cut off the head of Charles the First, the 



112 THE STUARTS OVERTHROWN. [1688. 

Stuart king who happened to be on the throne at 
the time, and for a few years governed themselves. 

The first Stuart came from France ; Mary Queen 
of Scots was a long time in that country (in fact, 
she was wife of its king, and therefore its queen 
for a while) ; and we shall find that when the Eng- 
lish people took the government into their own 
hands the member of the Stuart family who w^ould 
otherwise have been king went to France to stay. 

The result of ah this was that the Stuarts re- 
sembled the French in many ways. They fancied the 
graceful manners of that people, and they were most 
of them Catholics, too, or if they were not actually 
Catholics, they did not like the Protestants. 

As the English became more strongly Protestant, 
they resolved not to have the Stuarts rule them, and 
called Mary to the throne, because, though she was 
daughter of King James the Second, she had married 
a Protestant. This was a great revolution. The 
husband and wife were king and queen together. 
Mary's sister Anne reigned after her. She was also 
a Protestant. We shall do well not to forget 
these facts about the kings and queens of England 
at this time. 



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CHAPTER XXVIII. 




SIR WALTER RALEIGH'S LAST EFFORTS. 

IR Weaker RaleleH seems never to have 
been at all discourao-ed about makino- set- 
tlements in America. In spite of all his 
former failures, he determined upon one more ven- 
ture, and encouraged Bartholomew Gosnold to sail 
straight across the ocean to " Norumbega." By tak- 
ing the direct course he saved a thousand miles 
over former voyages. This was In 1602, just at the 
end of the rel^n of Oueen Elizabeth. 

Gosnold saw the coast of Elaine, which he sup- 
posed to be the veritable " Norumbega," and dis- 
covered Cape Cod, which he gave its present name. 
As he stepped ashore there, he was the first Eng- 
lishman who ever trod the soil of New England, as 
it is now defined. The expedition continued on to 

113 



114 GOSNOLD AT CUTTYHUNK. [1602. 

Buzzard's Bay, where a fort was begun by Gosnold 
on an island that he named EHzabeth, for his queen. 
It is now called Cuttyhunk. Though this navigator 
wished to honor his queen instead of himself, he has 
not been forgotten. There are sixteen little islands 
called Elizabeth now, and one hundred people live on 
them. They form together at own called Gosnold. 

This expedition did not accomplish more than 
the others had. The explorers made excursions 
upon the mainland, loaded their vessel with sassafras, 
then much esteemed in Europe as a medicine, and 
with cedar, and sailed back to England, where they 
arrived after an absence of four months. They had 
no bread left, and only a little vinegar to revive 
their spirits. Raleigh was not cast down, but said 
that he expected yet to see America an English 
nation. 

In the spring of 1603 some merchants of Bristol, 
with authority from Raleigh, planned another effort. 
This is a new evidence of the perseverance of the 
English. They sent one expedition after another 
out, though none seemed to prosper. 

This one sailed under command of Martin Pring, 
about two weeks after Oueen Elizabeth died, and 



1603.] KNICK-KNACKS FOR SASSAFRAS. 1 15 

only three days after the new sovereign, King 
James, arrived in London. It was well supplied with 
such knick-knacks as the Indians liked, which it was 
hoped to exchange for sassafras. Pring sighted the 
islands of Maine in June, and sailed southward. He 
crossed Massachusetts Bay and entered Plymouth 
harbor, where he remained six weeks and obtained 
sassafras. The expedition was at home in England 
by August. Sassafras w^as all it carried back. 

This may be called the last effort of Raleigh 
for America. He was almost immediately cast into 
prison by King James, and after many years of con- 
finement was executed. We must remember him 
for what he persistently tried to do for our country. 
Indeed, we cannot forget that all the unsuccessful 
voyages made the way clear for those which followed. 





CHAPTER XXIX. 

ENGLISH ADVENTURERS MORE RESTLESS THAN 

EVER. 

N spite of all these discouragements won- 
derful stories got abroad in England of the 
wealth that was to be had in America for 
the taking. It was represented in a popular play 
that gold was as plenty there as copper in the old 
country ; that prisoners were fettered in chains of 
that precious metal ; that rubies and diamonds were 
to be caught up by the handful ; that men of low 
birth might quickly rise in the social scale ; in fact, 
that nothing was impossible that the wildest imagina- 
tion could conceive. 

After the expeditions of Gosnold and Pring had 
returned, another was sent to see if what they said 
was true. It went out in 1605, under George Wey- 
mouth. These expeditions were all commanded by 
116 



1605.] RICHARD HAKLUVT THE SCHOLAR. 117 

able navigators, and were often sent out under the 
direction of earls and lords. 

Besides the titled patrons, there was the Rev. 
Richard Hakluyt who was interested in many of the 
expeditions. He was a scholar, and all the steps 
that he took were based on the best information 
that could be obtained. He was connected with the 
enterprises of Raleigh, and interested in the opera- 
tions of Drake ; and he collected lone accounts of 
most of the voyages and discoveries of the Eno-llsh. 
They would probably have been lost but for his pains. 
He wrote of more than two hundred expeditions. 

The war wdth Spain was over, and no longer 
excited adventurers. Thus the incentive that had 
sent Drake off to the Pacific Ocean did not exist 
any longer ; but there was now another reason why 
Englishmen should wish to search the American 
continent. The war had given the restless opportu- 
nities for adventure which peace did not offer, at 
home at least ; but many thought that they could 
find the excitement they needed in the effort to 
make settlements in a new land. There were Indians 
to be fought with, and perhaps there was gold to be 
got. At any rate, they would see. 



Il8 A MAN NAMED JOHN SMITH. [1606. 

A new plan was now begun. In the past every 
man had undertaken his enterprise alone, or with a 
few associates. Now it was proposed to form com- 
panies for the purpose of sending Englishmen to 
America. Naturally a man who entered into such a 
company expected to get some gain from it, and 
probably he thought that his chances would be 
greater because he had others with him. 

Gosnold was of course among the most inter- 
ested in the new plan. He seems to have brought 
in Hakluyt, with his common sense and wisdom. 
There happened to come home to England, just at 
that time, a man named John Smith, who told won- 
derful stories about his adventures. He said that 
he had fought in battles in Europe, Asia, and Africa ; 
had been made captive by the terrible Turks, sold 
as a slave, and sent off to a distant prison ; that he 
had escaped by wonderful skill and boldness, and at 
last had found refuge on an English ship which 
happened to be visiting the country of the Moors, 
where he was. 

Such a man as that seemed to Gosnold and the 
others just the kind for an expedition to America. 
Of course, no one knew exactly how much of his 



1606.] FERDIXAXDO GORGP:s. 119 

wonderful story to believe ; but they do not seem 
to have objected to his company on that account. 
He was a man of ability ; of that there was no doubt. 

There was also a certain Ferdinando Gorges, who 
wanted to become owner of some of the lands of 
America, and as he had a good deal of money and 
influence, he was considered a favorable person to 
be interested in the new compan\'. He had a friend. 
Sir John Popham, who was a chief justice, and he 
joined the company also. 

Among the others there was a rich merchant of 
London by the name of Edward Maria Wingfield, 
whose character was said by Smith to be not of the 
best. However, he was considered by others to be 
a gentleman, and was accepted as a partner. When 
the company asked the king to give them the privi- 
lege of making "plantations" in America under his 
authority, he decided to let them try. 



i'^ifiiiAS,^ 



CHAPTER XXX. 



KING JAMES'S COUNCIL FOR VIRGINIA. 




ING James selected thirteen men to be a 
Council in England to look after the 
enterprise, so that through them he could 
manage it himself. This was called the Council for 
Virginia. It was to make the laws for the Colonists. 
Two companies were formed. The first was called 
the London Company, because its members belonged 
to London. The second was called the Plymouth 
Company, because its members lived in the region 
of Bristol, Exeter, and Plymouth, England. 

The two companies were to plant their colonies 
between those parts of America occupied in a loose 
way by Spain and France, — that is, between South 
Carolina and New Brunswick, as our maps mark the 
country now. They were not to put their settle- 



1606.] THE LONDON AND PLYMOUTH COMPANIES. 121 

ments so near together as to run any risk of disputes. 
One hundred miles was to be allowed between a 
colony of one company and a colony of the other. 

The London Company was to make its setde- 
ments south of the line of Maryland. The Plymouth 
Company might not plant a colony farther south 
than the spot where New Haven now is. They 
were at liberty at first to occupy only a short dis- 
tance from the ocean, but afterward they were 
permitted to go as far west as the Pacific coast, if 
they pleased. The region between New Haven and 
Maryland was open to both, only they were not to 
get nearer together than one hundred miles. One 
would think this would keep them from quarreling ! 

The companies were formed of men who did not 
generally intend to leave their comfortable homes ; 
but they were to have authority over those w^ho 
should go. All who went were to remain English- 
men. This was a privilege that they prized very 
much. Their religion w^as to be that of the country 
the}' had left. They were to give the king in return 
for his patent one fifth of the produce of the gold 
and silver, and one fifteenth of the copper obtained, 
after paying the expenses of digging it. 



CHAPTER XXXI. 



VIRGINIA SETTLED. 




T was in 1606 that the king gave the pat- 
ents to the companies. A "patent" is a 
document which is open for everybody to 
read ; and it generally gives a privilege to the owner 
of which he is glad to have others know. ''Patent" 
means open. 

Just at. the end of the year, on the nineteenth 
of December, the London Company was ready to 
send out a fleet. It consisted of three vessels, with 
about one hundred men. They did not take their 
wives and children. They were like the men who 
went to California forty years ago to dig gold ; 
they thought that a new country was no place for 
women and children. Perhaps they remembered 
the fate of Virginia Dare and her mother, 



1607.] COLONISTS REACH VIRGINIA. 123 

It was the middle of May before the fleet 
reached the end of its journey. They decided to 
begin their town some fifty miles up the James 
river. They named the river in honor of their 
king. The settlement was to be called Jamestown. 

They had named the capes, at the mouth of 
the Chesapeake Bay, Charles and Henry, after the 
king's sons; and they fixed " Point Comfort" on the 
spot where it still remains, because it comforted 
them to see land after their long voyage. 

They were not the people to build a town ; 
there were but four carpenters, and the others were 
not accustomed to labor with their hands. Some 
did not know how, and others would not. The re- 
sult was that the colony did not prosper. 

John Smith was of their number, but he was 
not able to keep them in order. He went up the 
rivers to see if he could find " Norumbeea," or a 
passage through to Asia, and when he got safe 
back he told great stories about his adventures. 

Perhaps some things were true that he told, 
but we cannot be sure how much was imaginar}^ 
He made the acquaintance of an Indian chief, Pow- 
hatan, whom he thought a mighty prince, like 



124 COLONISTS REACH MAINE. 1607. 

some that he had heard of in the kingdom of the 
Grand Cham. He risked his Hfe among the sav- 
ages, but his tact and strength saved him. When 
Smith wrote an account of his explorations, he said 
that Powhatan treated him kindly ; but some years 
later he added that at one time the old chief was 
about to dash his brains out with a club, and that 
his little daughter Pocahontas threw herself upon 
him and saved his life. This story is doubted now. 
The colony dragged along in misery and trouble for 
several years. Its numbers were much reduced by 
deaths, but new colonists came. New charters were 
granted, and other changes made ; but still the settle- 
ment did not thrive. The Company had expected 
to gain sudden wealth, and had been disappointed. 

Meantime the Plymouth Company sent out a 
colony under Captain George Popham. It sailed 
from Plymouth In May, 1607, just after the other 
colonists had reached Jamestown. There were two 
ships, and a hundred settlers ; they had ample sup- 
plies. Their voyage was scarcely one-half as long 
as that of the London colonists ; but they were not 
at all pleased with the coast of Maine on which they 
landed, though It was in August, the month during 



THE AGE OF COLONIZATION OPENED. 



125 



which thousands of people now-a-days rush thither 
for pleasure. More than one-half returned with the 
ships they had come on, and the others onl)- stayed 
through the winter. They coined many excuses, and 
among other reasons said that the country was too 
cold for Englishmen. 

Thus was the continent of America discovered. 
Thus did enterprising men of different European 
nations explore it, and begin to establish themselves 
upon Its shores. The age of Colonization has been 
called one of the grandest and most sublime the 
earth has ever witnessed, and its story the " prose 
epic of the modern English nation." 






2^^ — " '?*'^"' ■- — ■* 







EXPLANATION 

OF THE PRONUNXIATIOX AND MEANING OF A FEW WORDS. 



Alchemist {arkeni-is(\ one \\\\o 
tries to make gold, 104. 

Alliam^bra, a great palace of the 
Moors, 43. 

Astrolabe {as' tro-Iabe^ astron, a 
star), an instrument, 38. 

AstroFog"er, a student of the 
stars, 33. 

Barque, a small vessel, 51. 

'^^2ih(^\\.{J)o-ab-der\ the last Moor- 
ish king of Granada, 45. 

Brandan, St., an abbot from 
Scotland or Ireland who sailed 
into the ocean, 34. 

Caravels defined, 34. 

Cardinal, a dignitary of the 
Church, 40. 

Cartier {kar' tee-ya), 33. 

Catliay, an old name for China, 23. 

Chain {kdni)^ the ruler of a region 
in Asia, 23. 

Charg'er, a war-horse, 63. 

Cipang'O {sipango), Japan, 23. 

Colony, a company of people trans- 
planted from one country to an- 



other, but still connected with the 
fatherland, 109. 

Columbus, ideas of, regarding 
the shape of the earth, 36. 

Compass, an instrument by means 
of which ships are guided, 22, 38. 

Conference, a meeting for dis- 
cussion, 42. 

Cortereal {cor-tay-ray-dl), 73. 

Counselors, persons who give 
advice, 41. 

Crusaders (Latin cj'u.r, a cross), 
cross-bearers who went to fight 
the Saracens, 22. 

Cupidity, longing for riches, 71. 

Cylinder, a body of the form of a 
roller, 13. 

Diaz {liee-az), Bartholomew, dis- 
covers the Cape of Good Hope, 

-5- 
Dieg'o {lic-dgo)^ Columbus, 33. 
Earth, shape of the, 13, 14. 
England, history of, 7. 
Fiord, a long narrow bay with 

liigh rocks on its sides, 13. 
127 



28 



EXPLANATION OF WORDS. 



Forlorn hope, a desperate case, 
41. 

Gold Coast, a region in Western 
Africa, near the equator, 32. 

Gorges {gor'jez), 119. 

Granada, fall of, 47. 

Hakluyt {Jiak'loot\ 117. 

History, a true story of events, 7. 

Knick-knacks, trifles, toys, 115. 

Labrador, so called because in 
Portuguese labi'ador means, 
"which can be cultivated," 17. 

Leif {life), the so-called discoverer 
of Vinland, 19. 

Tjoadstone (better spelled lode- 
sfone), the natural magnet, 16. 

Magellan ijjia-jcl' Ian), sails 
around the globe, 13. 

Mandeville, Sir John, sus- 
pected to be a myth, 14. 

Maps in the olden time, 30. 

Mediterranean, from two Latin 
words meaning '-in the midst of 
land," 13. 

Moslems, Saracens, 37. 

Niiia {iieen'yii), a ship of Colum- 
bus, 53. 

Parchment, skin prepared for 
writing on, 58. 

Pasqua Florida {paska), 74. 

Polo, Marco, a great traveler, 23, 

Printing", invention of, 29. 

Ponce de Leon {po?ise de le'oii), 

73- 
Powhatan {pdiu-hat-tan'\ 124. 
Quadrant, invention of the, 38. 



Roanoke {j-o' an-oke), 103. 
Saga {saga), a saying, a heroic tale 

of the Norsemen, 13. 
Saracens, followers of Moham- 
med, 21. 
Salamanca {sdldmdng'ka), a 

strong city of Spain, 42. 
Santa Fe {sd/ifdfay), 48. 
Sepulcher, a grave, 49. 
Seville {sev'il), a city of Spain, 

sixty miles from Cadiz, 43. 
Sirens, fascinating women of my- 
thology, 16. 
Skald (shl/d), an ancient bard af 

the north-lands, 13. 
Speculator, one who enters oh 

risky business, 67. 
Squadron, a number of vessels 

under command of one officer, 53. 
Tartary, the land of the Grand 

Cham, 26. 
Toscanelli, Paolo {pa-old), 33. 
Triumph, a pompous ceremony 

in ancient times, 62. 
Valparaiso {val-pd-)y' zo), 59. 
Vespvicci, Amerigo {7>es-poot- 

chee, ah-j)iay-ree-gd), 73. 
Viking {vik'ing), pirates from the 

North. Vick means a bay or 

fiord, 18. 
Vinland, visit of the Norsemen 

to, 19. 
Virgin, a maiden, 107. 
Warwick {ivdrick), 103. 
West, movement of men to the, 15. 
Youth, fountain of, 23. 



